FIC: [Haven] Hurricane Chasing - PG13
TITLE: Hurricane Chasing
AUTHOR: roseveare
RATING: PG13
LENGTH: ~6,500 words approx
SUMMARY: "I think you were all the heroes of some big story, and now here am I, stuck in the Epilogue." Paige remembers, piece by piece.
NOTES: written for Rabbitt in the After Forever post-finale Haven ficathon. 'Something exploring the actual ramifications of Audrey coming back as Paige.' This didn't quite go the places I expected it to go, but I find myself quite pleased with it? Also, in which far too much is read into Paige's name. I'm not completely sure where the reference to Paige being a teacher came from, but I've seen it mentioned by a few people in fandom so I have written with that in mind. The fic quotes briefly from Tennyson’s ‘Ulysses’.
DISCLAIMER: Not mine, no profit, yadda, yadda, yadda.
Hurricane Chasing
"I think I was a bartender in another life." She spins the glass and shoots the glimmering liquid into it from the bottle with a deft jerk of her hand, then flicks the bottle back down behind her and the glass in a slide along the bar down to Nathan.
He almost isn't on the ball to stop it, head sunk in the palm of his hand.
"What?" she demands.
It's not weird that Nathan co-owns a bar. The bar belonged to his dead friend and Gloria's -- who it's not at all weird would own a bar. Paige has seen Gloria drink. They've scraped together and patched up from almost a total wreck that was left after the hurricane hit town. The Grey Gull's journey to recovery is framed in photographs around the walls. The town and the bar both, the hurricane mostly destroyed. The Grey Gull had its re-opening a while back. Haven still has a way to go. Paige knew when she came here that she was settling down in a town that needed help to rebuild. It was what forged her decision to come. Meantime, The Grey Gull is an altar and a tombstone to the lost, and an anchor and a labour of love for the living.
It's weird that Nathan won't look at her right now. "Hey." She pats her hand on the counter for his attention, and he upends the drink in his hand over his mouth before he'll look at her and let her catch his eye. "I have never done this before. Don't you think that's strange?"
She sees a minimal shake of his head and a contrary answer in his eyes before he lies. "It's strange."
"You're a natural," Gloria says. "Duke would've been proud. Don't suppose you fancy a change of profession?" Gloria slaps Paige on the shoulder and looks mellow, but the frown she shoots at Nathan is anything but. Paige wonders anew what conspiracy lies there.
She doesn't like to push too much because she knows it has something to do with how Nathan was hurt. Everyone in town was hurt, but he's one of the ones who still walks around with an emptiness in the back of his eyes. The way she clicked with him, instant, crazy, the sort of love-at-first-goof that she'd never believed in... If it had not been for that, she would never have entertained attaching herself to such a damaged soul. She was looking for escape and a new start, after William.
Most single mothers wouldn't choose to make their new start in a town hit by freak storms on the tail of a freak meteorite shower, cut off from the world for months for reasons no-one can quite account for even though it irrefutably happened. But sometimes change cries out to be astronomical before it feels like it really matters. She tells herself that. She wanted to be so new that 'ordinary' wouldn't cut it.
Nathan manages to drag his spirits out of the bedrock enough to muster a smile. "Sorry." He pushes the glass away and holds up his hands. "I'd better leave this alone if I'm to go back to work this evening."
"You have to work this evening?" Paige asks, dismayed. Between both of their Rebuilding Committee projects -- on which their paths ironically almost never cross -- they seem to see little enough of each other some weeks.
"McHugh and Rogers want to talk about some new New Guard project," he explains. "So not technically work, but we will be meeting in the police station."
Paige had never previously encountered a volunteer organisation that were more like an obsessed fraternity with tattoos and secret handshakes and passcodes, but New Guard is Haven's interpretation of that theme. She learned fast that Haven does everything weird.
Of course her lightning new random!boyfriend is a member, though why Nathan sometimes looks at his New Guard tattoo and suddenly goes so quiet and pale and soulsick is something else she doesn't understand.
The police department are involved in all of the rebuilding projects, in ways charming and rural and vaguely contrary to Paige's image of what police departments are about. Sometimes Paige fancies that Haven is a little kingdom all of its own and she's attached herself to its King. A sad King of a populace that half still resent him for some undefined slight, despite how he tries so fiercely for them every day.
Nathan rises stiffly. She can see the weary dent that his crown has left in his brow intensifying as he prepares to head out. "You want a ride back?"
"Mm." Paige needs to pick up James from Vicki. They have an arrangement of babyshares, she and Gloria and Vicki. James and Aaron love the company of someone else who speaks the same gurgling language. Maybe they'll start some new private language of their own, the way they say some twins do, with all the time they're spending together.
They leave Gloria propping up the bar, with her actual bar staff. Paige wonders again about pulling drinks and flipping cocktails and an idea flashes through her head that there's a world where a version of her exists who has long hair-extensions and black nails and speaks with a lazy drawl. Whose skirts are soft black leather climbing high up her thighs, and whose body hangs with jewellery, some of which is pierced right through.
She can remember leaning across an imagined bar and talking to William. It's her William -- sleazebag -- but it's a William slightly off-kilter from what she knows, a William who fit that other world.
"What is it?" She realises she's stumbled to a stop outside the porch of the Gull as Nathan's voice intrudes her thoughts. "...Paige, are you all right?"
He often has that little hesitation before he says her name.
Right now it hits her that Nathan is some other world's version of the true love she never met. "...I wasn't a bartender, was I?" she asks shakily, forcing herself to meet his eyes, and forcing him to meet hers.
"You were never really a bartender." His words are sincere and firm, though the firmness is very far buried under concern and compassion and hurt. "Aud...?" He stops. Breathes. He has gone very still. When he speaks again, he's pulled back and his words come out tight. "What is it? Did you... remember something? Paige?"
"I've never taken drugs. Never even really been drunk. I can account for every minute of my whole life," she tells him. "I think I need to talk to one of those people who do that hypno... regresso... what do they call it?"
"Past life regression?" Nathan suggests blankly, and mutters under his breath that it "sounds like something Duke would've gone in for."
She didn't know Duke and she doesn't know why Nathan seems to have all but stopped drawing breath, like he's waiting for an axe to fall or some other heavy or pointy thing. "Well, that, then," she agrees. "Do we have someone who does that in Haven?"
Another flash crosses her brain, and she remembers red hair and a broad smile on full lips and such a feeling of warmth that comes with the name Claire.
Claire Callahan, the full name arrives in her, and she bites her lip and doesn't say it aloud, because Nathan's acting worried and weird enough already.
She keeps it to herself and she looks it up later. Claire Callahan was a real practising psychiatrist, who died before the meteor storm. She was the victim of a serial killer. In a town this size, they managed to have a hurricane and meteor storm and a serial killer, all in little more than twelve months. The picture that Paige finds looks exactly like Paige's imagined Claire.
She's been here before.
It's not the first time she's thought it, but there's a difference between odd feelings of familiarity and déjà vu and something this concrete.
She starts thinking about all those theories that reincarnation doesn't follow linear time. She wonders if she could look through Haven's records and find out, if she could recognise somehow who she was in this town before.
***
No psychology or mysticism is required to identify who she was in Haven before. Almost as soon as she starts looking at what archive pictures remain of the town in the last few years, she finds her.
Audrey Parker. The name fits, rings through her like a bell -- a pure, fine note that makes her current self feel small and shabby by comparison.
But this is not reincarnation. The woman in the pictures is her, down to every detail save the colour of her hair.
She sounds out Dwight and McHugh, who worked for the military and she has some sense should know about such things. "There are those programs the government has, right? Top secret stuff, where they brainwash people so far under a cover identity they don't even know they were ever anyone else until -- bam!" Her wild gesture with her hands causes Dwight's bulging eyes to bulge even further.
"What... brought this on?" he chokes, as McHugh scrunches his lips into a funny shape and rolls his eyes in a fashion that indicates not me and you're fielding this one, buddy and have fun all at once.
Paige shows Dwight the pictures.
"I tried to think of a rational explanation. I mean, this is not a relative or a twin... Though I was adopted, I guess I could have a twin I don't know about. But everyone wouldn't be doing this weird dance for my sister, and besides, I remember. Not a lot, but... pieces, impressions? So... what did they do to me? Were there aliens? Government programs?"
She stares at him for a long time before he answers. It probably gets annoyingly pleading before the end.
But she sees him melting and pushes the advantage.
"There... may have been aliens," Dwight allows. She's close to something, but he retreats. "You should ask Nathan. This isn't -- I can't."
"Nathan isn't the boss of you, just because he's Police Chief," Paige retorts, and rides over Dwight's soft, weird snort, "I swear, the people in this town--"
"We were cut off for a while," McHugh says evenly. "You get tight loyalties, situation like that. Structures."
"I don't care about structures," Paige snaps. "This is about me. Look! She has my face. Her name was Audrey. And to think I always thought 'Paige' was bad..."
She curls her fingers sadly over the photos. In more than half of them, she is with Nathan. In some he looks happy. She thought she knew what happy looked like on him; thought she had teased it out. But he looks far happier in the photos than she has ever seen him look in the flesh.
"Was that what hurt him so much, when he lost her?"
She pauses on a photo, pointedly. In it, her phantom double is standing with Dwight. He can't claim ignorance or innocence.
"No. Yes. It's... more complicated than that." Dwight's struggling, and she realises it's Nathan he's trying to protect in this equation. He wants to let Nathan be the one to tell her. "Look, you're not some kind of sleeper assassin. Nothing like that. Maybe you should just let things be. You're Paige now. You're in love with Nathan. You're helping this town get back on its feet. That's all that matters. The hunt for identity never did her any good."
Paige brushes the pad of her thumb over her own tiny face. "Do you mean me, when you say 'her'?"
"...Not really." A gruff grunt. "You're you."
"It could be easier on everyone if you do it," McHugh suggests to Dwight. "Get it out in the open, over and done with."
"You tell me," Paige encourages the slightly smaller huge man, quick to jump into the opening.
"Oh no." McHugh raises his empty hands, the same time as Dwight says, "Don't do it."
This town was torn apart. She came with James, for a new start, for her, but also to be a part of the rebuilding. Somehow she can't help but equate the town's state of damage with Nathan. She's spent the months she's been here trying to rebuild them both. People died here, though, in circumstances they don't talk about, and there are all sorts of unhealed wounds, and she must be careful lest she do further damage.
Her head aches dully. "All right," she sighs. "I don't know if I'll ask today. I think maybe I want to think about this more on my own before I approach Nathan at all."
He must have a reason for not telling her. People died here, and this town is so full of secrets. She's almost not surprised to discover that she's one of them.
***
It's not unusual that Nathan's house is haunted. So is all of Haven. Paige keeps finding ghosts of herself all over town.
They wanted volunteers to sort out the archives of the old Haven Herald newspaper, and help the new fellow Glyn McDermot, who the Teagues cousin from out of town sold the business to, so that he can get a local paper up and running again. Nathan didn't want her to do it. Three days into the effort she found out why.
Paige sits in Nathan's living room, still in that oasis of time where he hasn't come home yet and James is quiet, actually sleeping, which he hasn't been for the most of this week. She pokes the photocopied clippings around on the coffee table.
Last night she dreamed of making love to Nathan on the beach, and in the back of some type of flashy classic car she's never been in. Only it wasn't a fantasy, too real for that. The date in the clipping that resonates with the memory is 1955. Even if she keeps being born again and again and coming back to this town, how does that explain Nathan? Unless they're two of a kind who come back and collide and collide through different lives. Only this Nathan is still living in the last one, and hasn't died and been reborn yet to fit her.
It's not actually the craziest theory she's entertained.
A breeze tickles the photo that says Officer Audrey Parker polices the flower show underneath, even though there's no draft, no breeze. She watches the photo's corners peel up and the whole thing inch a little nearer to her across the table.
"I know," she says, covering the cutting with her palm and looking around guiltily, though she knows Nathan isn't back because she's on tenterhooks to frantically hide the cuttings the moment she hears the door. Nathan won't entertain the idea of having a ghost. "Did you know her too?"
It's the photo that says the most emphatically that even if this was her, she was radically different then. Audrey Parker in the picture has a gun, even though she's only patrolling flowers. Paige doesn't begin to know how she feels about that.
The string of primary coloured plastic policemen and firemen across the top of James' crib jingles, like someone just gently ran a finger along them.
"Did you know me? Don't wake James," she adds, and looks around for something else to use. She's seen enough fakey ghost shows on TV to know how this works. Nathan has a singing bowl on the side of a shelf that he never touches, which is a weird thing for Nathan to have anyway. She gets up and puts it on the table in front of her. The bowl sings the quietest note with no-one touching it.
"Are you a man or a woman?" Paige asks, feeling intimidated, now she has the means, by the prospect of interrogating a ghost. The question sounds stupid to her ears. There's no response, and she realises she needs to frame her questions with the potential for a yes/no answer or this isn't going to work. "Make it chime if you're a man," she adds, and listens to the note's soft exhale.
"Did you know me?" she asks again, and the bowl sings. "You were someone who was living in Haven before, when Audrey was living here?" The noise should be tiny but it rises like a storm. James whuffles and shifts and gives a faint cry.
Paige finds her limbs trembling. Communicating with the dead takes its toll. She goes to the crib to pick up James, whose blinking eyes seem confused by more than just gas. It was a mistake to pick him up with that tremor still running through her. He senses it and only starts to cry more. She puts him back down in the crib, making hush noises, and brings the crib to place next to her when she sits back down on the sofa.
"I'm going to read to James," she tells the ghost, taking the book she left on the arm of the plush couch, pages spread upside-down. A literary crime, it's true, but nobody has ever been able to break her from the habit. "And to you, since you're here, and I doubt it's very exciting sitting around invisibly like this... Let's see..." She flicks the pages uneasily and thinks about which poems might get a reaction out of the ghost. She settles on one she has the trace of an excuse to read. "Are you like Nathan, a Tennyson man?"
In truth, Nathan had not liked anything so much as he seems to like the sound of her voice reading. He affects a constipated expression for most of the subject matter. It's the same expression he wore when he realised Paige intended to fill his living room with wall-to-wall books after his whirlwind offer that she should move in. She has found a certain pool of things that she judges by minute changes in that expression are Acceptable, though he never verbally acknowledges it.
Paige settles back and starts to read. James gurgles and quiets, long attuned to rhythm and meter and finding his restfulness in it, from the very day he was born.
The ghost is too quiet, and she wonders if he's gone, bored, and she should've chosen a poem that was shorter or less pompously flowery. Though as she reaches the last cluster of lines, "we are not now that strength which in old days moved Earth and Heaven", the table rattles in agitation as if he's tired of her point.
Paige stops reading. "I think you were a hero of this story, too." She waits for any reaction, but there is none. "I think you were all the heroes of some big story, and now here am I, stuck in the Epilogue."
She frowns. "But I'm not sure you're really the overblown heroics type." If there's a vibe of personality she gets from the ghost, it's far more irreverent than that. She gets up, puts the poetry anthology down on the coffee table, goes to the bookshelf. "Let's try some magic and hijinks... A Midsummer Night's Dream..."
The book she left on the table is spiralling through pages fast, of its own accord. It stops after a moment, and she slowly lets out her held breath before stepping closer to see where it landed. The Rime of the Ancient Mariner.
"Is this expressing a preference, or a message?"
Nathan's friend Duke had loved the sea.
She watches the string of public service workers dance on James' crib. When they settle, James keeps laughing, but it's at something she can't see. Children see and hear things that adults can't detect.
"Are you Duke?" The bowl sings loud.
The front door opens with a crunch that seems to split the air. She feels the ghost go into retreat, even while her heart is lurching and she grabs for the scattered clippings and photos to sweep them all up and hide them inside the thick book. She's just replaced it on the shelf when Nathan walks in.
***
Children aren't the best repository for secrets: conspiracies struggle to find traction on that ground. Even so, Haven breeds them formidably tight-lipped. But it's the after school writing club that provides the first chink in the dam.
Paige is trained and more than willing to assist when it comes to providing extracurricular activities as a bandage to the town's months of trauma, filling the silence of the hours, the gaps in the classrooms and the neighbourhoods.
Candle, is the prompt. Ten minutes' freeform writing. At the high end of the spectrum, church candles, memorial, rebirth. At the low end, raw survival and fire and light, the dawn of technology, the nights after the power went that Paige knows must have happened. It's a little, flickering potential for a breakthrough, not meant to rage like a pyre.
She isn't ready for, 'When the darkness came, we huddled around candles and flashlights, anything that was left. We daren't go to sleep. I saw Tomas Biddle get eaten by the dark when he got pushed too far from the edge. We had to sit all night in the classroom with his bones. Mrs Faraday wrapped them in a coat and tried to hide them so we couldn't see, but we all knew he was still there, in pieces under her desk.'
It's not the graphic, visceral content that shocks her (though it would), but how Paige remembers it.
Huddling in the dark around those little lights. Adults, children, friends, enemies.
Grayson. Murderers... They killed a man in front of her. She sees his white bones in the dark beyond the door, the way Tomas Biddle's bones must have looked... only... those smaller...
Paige can't hold in her little gasp or stop herself covering her mouth with her hand.
"I'm sorry, Miss," Meredith Lentil whispers. "People don't like talking about it..."
This is not a fiction, Paige thinks.
There's a fortitude with the memories. She doesn't like to call it callousness, but it's still the calluses formed over Audrey's mind that she was not a stranger to such horrors. She prefers to think of it being Paige, in her own compassion, who responds firmly, "You can talk to me about anything you want. I know it was very terrible, in the dark."
The girl nods seriously, blinking back tears, and mushes her lips together with childish determination that makes Paige's heart ache.
Audrey was a warrior, thinks the seated-watcher part of her at the back of her mind, while she talks softly to the children in the present. In the flashback, Audrey had a gun and faced up to the killers and forced them to stop.
Paige is not that.
She wonders, behind how many stares do the people around her remember Audrey and yearn for a lost hero? Paige cannot be a warrior, and wouldn't want to be.
Like the unveiled fiction of her remembered past, she's beginning to realise the wider fiction. There was no hurricane, or if there was, it was no normal hurricane.
"Miss, do you remember the trees that drank blood? I still have nightmares--"
"Miss Paige, the flying sharks, and invisible monsters, they won't ever come back--? Mom said you'd gone away to make sure they wouldn't ever, but then you came back..."
"Miss Paige--"
"Miss Paige--"
"Miss Audrey--"
The memories don't come on command for every prodding question, but she gets a few more rising surges, until her head is banging and she can't wait for the after-school session to end, for parents to come collect their children. She can't very well wrap up and abandon them all here ahead of time.
She goes home to Nathan in a daze. Unlocks the white door of his yellow house and the small action rolls out and throws echoes back at her. She unlocks and unlocks and unlocks, in different clothes she'd never wear, with a gun at her hip, with some ominous threat on her tail. That turn-and-click is a microcosm of her relationship with Nathan, with Haven, always too familiar from the start
She feels different, after the deluge from the children. The things she remembered can't be put back in the box. They're part of her now, indelible.
Nathan looks up from what looks suspiciously like a police report (there is a Solemn Agreement that there will be no work on actual home time, when he's not actively called away from her to something that she understands he cannot duck). He instantly drops the papers on the table and straightens, then gets up all the way and steps toward her. "Are you alright?"
Suddenly her patience with the softly-softly disintegrates. "I've been here before. She was called Audrey, and you loved her, too."
He flinches like she hit him, and she'd never do that. Paige regrets the outburst on the instant.
But a measure of hurt still coils in her belly, catching her off-guard when it pounces. "Were you always waiting for me to become her again?"
"You are her," he says, and struggles, and musters even as she has no idea what she actually feels, "You're still you."
"Are we talking about essence? Spirit? Soul?" Paige responds. "Because in terms of actual traits--"
She cannot imagine carrying a gun, using threat or force as solution.
I was made for peace-time . The flash-thought makes her blink and back off a step. If Audrey was their promised hero, Paige is something else.
"Audrey--" Nathan, thinking she is in retreat from him, lunges with an ill-thought plea, and the ghost drops a stack of bills and unopened junk mail from the top of the fridge onto his head. He staggers sideways and hits the table, momentarily blinded by the face full of paper, and goes down on one knee.
Paige gives a yelp of dismay and runs to help.
"Paige," Nathan corrects, realising his error. Paying more attention to that than his bleeding wrist, skinned on the table corner.
"It must have been very hard," she muses -- a fraction tritely. "Not saying it all this time." She takes his wrist in her hands, either side of the scrape, and looks around for something to staunch the blood.
"I love you," he says, putting emphasis on that last word.
"I know." He had welcomed her into his life so quickly, but kept high walls and iron barred gates up around some private core of grief. She sees that core breached now, with the revelation of the secrets this situation forced him to keep. A beginning, anyway.
He rubs his thigh where it hit the chair, and gives a subdued growl, half under his breath, "God damn it, Duke."
Something whispers through his hair, stirring the soft, light-brown ends of his outgrowing cut.
"He misses you," Paige says. "It's about time you acknowledged him."
Nathan clutches the edge of the table and averts his face just for a few seconds, like a turtle ducking into his shell, before bringing it back up. He's still on one knee, looking up at her with the glitter of moisture in his eyes as he murmurs, "I missed you both."
***
It isn't that he wanted Audrey more (though he probably also did), but either way he couldn't talk to her about real things, and after all he'd been through, stifled silence with the partner who'd shared his experiences was an unusual cruelty. The secrecy was for her own good -- the headaches from remembering Lucy, the first time -- but probably a little bit for his, too. After everything he had been through, after thinking he'd lost her for good, how could he ever muster the emotional fortitude to risk losing her by voicing the insane truth?
When she acknowledges to him, to herself, the things that are as they are, and that she isn't going to leave Nathan, things start to feel better, more solid. They're stronger together. A family, complete with baby and ghost. A normal, regular kind of family in Haven.
Paige tells Dwight that Nathan knows, in Haven Joe's Subterranean Bakery and Coffee Shop on a rainy Thursday lunchtime. She sees the relief in his eyes. Then she sees his eyes narrow, and he asks, "Do you know?"
"I'm remembering some things." Paige narrows her eyes back. It probably looks more like a short sighted squint on her, and he deserves a more convincing glower, when what he actually means is are you Audrey? "You know I'll never be her. Not exactly the same. Not even if I remember everything."
She's pretty sure about that. Surely the experiences she has had which are not Audrey -- a lifetime's memories of Not-Audrey -- would continue to define her even if all Audrey's memories returned.
Dwight sighs. "I'm sorry. It's... hard. I like to think... there had to be a reason, that she chose to do this. More than him." Nathan. "Audrey fought so hard to be just precisely who she was at the end."
Paige blinks.
"Sometimes," he adds, "you're nothing like her at all."
Audrey might have offered some glib quip, or an attention-diverting joke to take the tension out, or faced the accusation head-on to challenge it. Paige sees no need to.
"I just wish I knew why she did it," Dwight says again, and buries his face in his cream-and-syrup-and-sprinkle-topped latte.
She loved Nathan. Paige ponders. While on the surface an obvious answer, love is no altar to sacrifice identity upon. Nathan loved Audrey. Nathan and Paige at the beginning were held together by luck, determination and the metaphorical sticky-tape of half-baked instinct.
"When I remember," Paige tells him, "I'll let you know." Her heart beats in rhythm of that found mantra, I was made for peace-time. She sips her coffee to calm herself and takes a moment, letting her eyes wander around the sunken coffee shop. Haven Joe is a determined marketer. The roof of the building is at ground level, but steps have been dug out, along with the shafts sunk to let a little light in through the buried windows. Paige is a little incredulous with herself now that she accepted a hurricane as an adequate explanation for all of this damage. "Now, how's McHugh? Has he mastered those cupcakes that Lizzie likes yet?"
There is nothing quite like the image of McHugh in a flour covered baking apron to lighten conversation in any circumstance.
***
Audrey's memories return in full in the middle of a restless night. It's their first night back in bed together after a two-day waking nightmare, following Nathan getting shot by some idiot from the Guard who doesn't understand the concept, the Troubles are over.
Paige should have foreseen that would bring out the warrior spirit, Audrey coming back in a blaze of fury to protect.
Paige did not move to grab the gun, nor strike the man, but flung herself down between them, plastering herself over Nathan's fallen form before he could shoot again; babbled pleas and spun out all the justifications and understanding she could bring to bear until the gunman was also on his knees sobbing.
It happens between one half-drowsing moment and the next, as Nathan mumbles and shifts next to her, then makes a soft sound of pain at the movement. She transitions to instant wakefulness with her head full of all the other times she almost lost him. Times he almost died, times he did die, and she really shouldn't have to move onto a second hand to count the latter.
The memories are only a revelation for a moment, then they're a part of her she can't disentangle again ever.
"Nathan..." She frames his name on her lips without sound, and touches the unmarked skin above the white bandaging on his side. She remembers leaving him, watching him walk away down the steps from the Armoury.
"Parker..." he groans, his fingers unconsciously chasing her touch.
She called herself 'Lexie' once, a lie under a lie. It was very confusing, so newly-reborn. Paige is still uppermost, even if they'd rather have their archetypal warrior. As Audrey, she might still have talked down the Guard man, she realises. Though she might have swept his gun arm to the side as it dipped in reaction after the first shot, kicked him in the groin, and swept her other arm upward to slam the heel of her palm against the underside of his jaw.
"No," she says gently, stroking Nathan's undamaged ribs. "It's Paige."
With two complete sets of memories cohabiting one brain, she wonders if it's the choice of name that shapes the identity more than anything. A framework of words, stories told to self, names are often believed to hold primal power. She remembers choosing to be Audrey pretending to be Lexie. She remembers being Audrey. She remembers precious things that were hidden from her before, and because she has changed she can't regret them, but maybe also because of the value of those memories. She can't regret all the different shades of growing to love Nathan that were bypassed second time around by some unconscious internal programming. They have history now.
So does Haven. She remembers Duke... and although many of the memories are uncomfortable, challenging, bad, there are so many things she would never trade. This sadness could never be exchanged for never having known him at all, not remembering all that Duke sacrificed.
And now she properly knows who she's talking to, who's floating around their house.
Paige sighs into Nathan's shoulder, careful of his injury. His right arm wriggles under her to curl around her, regardless of his injury. She's not working blind in the dark anymore, but the heaviness that comes with Audrey's memories is an ache. It was easier being just Paige.
She hears movement from James, in the nursery, and carefully worms her way out from Nathan's grasp. Padding from room to room in the dark, barefoot, she finds the toys dancing on the edge of James' cot, and her baby who was a few minutes ago crying that quiet cry that's a warm-up to much bigger things, is now chuckling and poking stubby hands at the toys that move on their own.
Thanks, Duke. She opens her mouth, but the words don't come. She curls her hands on the bar of the cot and stares down at her son.
...Can this really be James Cogan?
James Cogan was a man, who'd already lived and died. Died young, but had a life, loves and adventures and a journey of his own. It would be strange to imagine that had somehow been undone. She thinks about the movement of time in the Barn and supposes there might be another option.
She can't answer that question for sure, any more than she can answer Dwight's. She remembers Croatoan, Vince, saying goodbye to Nathan. Going into the Armoury. Her own memories -- Paige's -- start after, placing the rest of the story a whole lifetime distant. The time spent in the Armoury remains a white blank.
Morning finds her sitting with James in the kitchen, rocking him on her lap, having decided she isn't going to think about that question, at least. She loves her son, whoever he is. Nathan eases in through the door, moving like it pains him. She meant to go check on him before now. Duke pulls out a chair before Nathan has to overreach to do it, allowing him to fold gratefully down into it.
"I remember everything," Paige tells him neutrally.
His eyes lift but it's with wary confirmation and not the traitor joy that she feared. "I thought... You're never so relaxed about being called the wrong name." He's quiet a moment. "It was still the wrong name, though."
"I'm choosing to stay Paige," is how she frames it. There has to be a reason. She frees a hand and reaches out across the table top to clasp his; to soften the blow, if such it is.
Nathan says, "I know who you are."
Paige finds cavernous depths in the reassurance of his steady voice. She leans over the table to kiss him, and when his lips part to accept hers it feels different and the same, infused by more desperation and too many terrible and fraught goodbyes. But he clasps his good arm around to hold her with a new -- no, it's an old conviction, newly returned.
Surely coming back like this, she made things more difficult for Nathan and herself than they needed to be.
She thinks back to Dwight's question. Why would she? Thinks about the things she surrounded herself with here, her books and her baby, her causes, her goals, her past life and this one in stark contrast. I was made for peace-time.
She was. Nathan wasn't, isn't, not yet. Dwight, McHugh, Gloria, the rest of Haven, they're still struggling to find the rhythm of living in peace.
She doesn't remember the decisions she made in the Armoury that would give her absolute answers. She doesn't think she ever will. For all she knows, it was so very dull in there, and Croatoan and Vince were driving her up the wall, and she couldn't take another moment of it.
She prefers a different tale. One where she came back, and came back this way, because she could see how they were struggling, unable to rest from all their strife and travel, and there was so much work still to do to rebuild. She has come back and back to Haven to help them fight the Troubles for centuries. The first thing she did this time -- after meeting Nathan -- was to join the Rebuilding Committee. After the war is over, when the storm has passed, a different kind of work begins.
Maybe she could tell already back there that even if she could have found a way to come back to them as Audrey Parker, she would struggle and flounder the same ways that they were. Maybe Paige was as much a gift to herself as to Haven. She chooses to believe that she was a gift and not a sacrifice, that she chose to return renewed with the tools to salvage and rebuild, a part of the solution lest she become part of the problem.
After all, she has been the warrior guardian of Haven for a long time. It's probably time to turn over a new leaf.
She holds Nathan's hand and her sleeping baby. Together they sit up and watch the dawn stream in through the kitchen windows.
END
ENDNOTE: This fic probably wouldn't have happened if Katta and her story in progress hadn't started me on the track of thinking about Paige as a character in her own right. Some of the thoughts in here very likely had their genesis in having read that (as yet unposted) work.
Or read on AO3
AUTHOR: roseveare
RATING: PG13
LENGTH: ~6,500 words approx
SUMMARY: "I think you were all the heroes of some big story, and now here am I, stuck in the Epilogue." Paige remembers, piece by piece.
NOTES: written for Rabbitt in the After Forever post-finale Haven ficathon. 'Something exploring the actual ramifications of Audrey coming back as Paige.' This didn't quite go the places I expected it to go, but I find myself quite pleased with it? Also, in which far too much is read into Paige's name. I'm not completely sure where the reference to Paige being a teacher came from, but I've seen it mentioned by a few people in fandom so I have written with that in mind. The fic quotes briefly from Tennyson’s ‘Ulysses’.
DISCLAIMER: Not mine, no profit, yadda, yadda, yadda.
Hurricane Chasing
"I think I was a bartender in another life." She spins the glass and shoots the glimmering liquid into it from the bottle with a deft jerk of her hand, then flicks the bottle back down behind her and the glass in a slide along the bar down to Nathan.
He almost isn't on the ball to stop it, head sunk in the palm of his hand.
"What?" she demands.
It's not weird that Nathan co-owns a bar. The bar belonged to his dead friend and Gloria's -- who it's not at all weird would own a bar. Paige has seen Gloria drink. They've scraped together and patched up from almost a total wreck that was left after the hurricane hit town. The Grey Gull's journey to recovery is framed in photographs around the walls. The town and the bar both, the hurricane mostly destroyed. The Grey Gull had its re-opening a while back. Haven still has a way to go. Paige knew when she came here that she was settling down in a town that needed help to rebuild. It was what forged her decision to come. Meantime, The Grey Gull is an altar and a tombstone to the lost, and an anchor and a labour of love for the living.
It's weird that Nathan won't look at her right now. "Hey." She pats her hand on the counter for his attention, and he upends the drink in his hand over his mouth before he'll look at her and let her catch his eye. "I have never done this before. Don't you think that's strange?"
She sees a minimal shake of his head and a contrary answer in his eyes before he lies. "It's strange."
"You're a natural," Gloria says. "Duke would've been proud. Don't suppose you fancy a change of profession?" Gloria slaps Paige on the shoulder and looks mellow, but the frown she shoots at Nathan is anything but. Paige wonders anew what conspiracy lies there.
She doesn't like to push too much because she knows it has something to do with how Nathan was hurt. Everyone in town was hurt, but he's one of the ones who still walks around with an emptiness in the back of his eyes. The way she clicked with him, instant, crazy, the sort of love-at-first-goof that she'd never believed in... If it had not been for that, she would never have entertained attaching herself to such a damaged soul. She was looking for escape and a new start, after William.
Most single mothers wouldn't choose to make their new start in a town hit by freak storms on the tail of a freak meteorite shower, cut off from the world for months for reasons no-one can quite account for even though it irrefutably happened. But sometimes change cries out to be astronomical before it feels like it really matters. She tells herself that. She wanted to be so new that 'ordinary' wouldn't cut it.
Nathan manages to drag his spirits out of the bedrock enough to muster a smile. "Sorry." He pushes the glass away and holds up his hands. "I'd better leave this alone if I'm to go back to work this evening."
"You have to work this evening?" Paige asks, dismayed. Between both of their Rebuilding Committee projects -- on which their paths ironically almost never cross -- they seem to see little enough of each other some weeks.
"McHugh and Rogers want to talk about some new New Guard project," he explains. "So not technically work, but we will be meeting in the police station."
Paige had never previously encountered a volunteer organisation that were more like an obsessed fraternity with tattoos and secret handshakes and passcodes, but New Guard is Haven's interpretation of that theme. She learned fast that Haven does everything weird.
Of course her lightning new random!boyfriend is a member, though why Nathan sometimes looks at his New Guard tattoo and suddenly goes so quiet and pale and soulsick is something else she doesn't understand.
The police department are involved in all of the rebuilding projects, in ways charming and rural and vaguely contrary to Paige's image of what police departments are about. Sometimes Paige fancies that Haven is a little kingdom all of its own and she's attached herself to its King. A sad King of a populace that half still resent him for some undefined slight, despite how he tries so fiercely for them every day.
Nathan rises stiffly. She can see the weary dent that his crown has left in his brow intensifying as he prepares to head out. "You want a ride back?"
"Mm." Paige needs to pick up James from Vicki. They have an arrangement of babyshares, she and Gloria and Vicki. James and Aaron love the company of someone else who speaks the same gurgling language. Maybe they'll start some new private language of their own, the way they say some twins do, with all the time they're spending together.
They leave Gloria propping up the bar, with her actual bar staff. Paige wonders again about pulling drinks and flipping cocktails and an idea flashes through her head that there's a world where a version of her exists who has long hair-extensions and black nails and speaks with a lazy drawl. Whose skirts are soft black leather climbing high up her thighs, and whose body hangs with jewellery, some of which is pierced right through.
She can remember leaning across an imagined bar and talking to William. It's her William -- sleazebag -- but it's a William slightly off-kilter from what she knows, a William who fit that other world.
"What is it?" She realises she's stumbled to a stop outside the porch of the Gull as Nathan's voice intrudes her thoughts. "...Paige, are you all right?"
He often has that little hesitation before he says her name.
Right now it hits her that Nathan is some other world's version of the true love she never met. "...I wasn't a bartender, was I?" she asks shakily, forcing herself to meet his eyes, and forcing him to meet hers.
"You were never really a bartender." His words are sincere and firm, though the firmness is very far buried under concern and compassion and hurt. "Aud...?" He stops. Breathes. He has gone very still. When he speaks again, he's pulled back and his words come out tight. "What is it? Did you... remember something? Paige?"
"I've never taken drugs. Never even really been drunk. I can account for every minute of my whole life," she tells him. "I think I need to talk to one of those people who do that hypno... regresso... what do they call it?"
"Past life regression?" Nathan suggests blankly, and mutters under his breath that it "sounds like something Duke would've gone in for."
She didn't know Duke and she doesn't know why Nathan seems to have all but stopped drawing breath, like he's waiting for an axe to fall or some other heavy or pointy thing. "Well, that, then," she agrees. "Do we have someone who does that in Haven?"
Another flash crosses her brain, and she remembers red hair and a broad smile on full lips and such a feeling of warmth that comes with the name Claire.
Claire Callahan, the full name arrives in her, and she bites her lip and doesn't say it aloud, because Nathan's acting worried and weird enough already.
She keeps it to herself and she looks it up later. Claire Callahan was a real practising psychiatrist, who died before the meteor storm. She was the victim of a serial killer. In a town this size, they managed to have a hurricane and meteor storm and a serial killer, all in little more than twelve months. The picture that Paige finds looks exactly like Paige's imagined Claire.
She's been here before.
It's not the first time she's thought it, but there's a difference between odd feelings of familiarity and déjà vu and something this concrete.
She starts thinking about all those theories that reincarnation doesn't follow linear time. She wonders if she could look through Haven's records and find out, if she could recognise somehow who she was in this town before.
***
No psychology or mysticism is required to identify who she was in Haven before. Almost as soon as she starts looking at what archive pictures remain of the town in the last few years, she finds her.
Audrey Parker. The name fits, rings through her like a bell -- a pure, fine note that makes her current self feel small and shabby by comparison.
But this is not reincarnation. The woman in the pictures is her, down to every detail save the colour of her hair.
She sounds out Dwight and McHugh, who worked for the military and she has some sense should know about such things. "There are those programs the government has, right? Top secret stuff, where they brainwash people so far under a cover identity they don't even know they were ever anyone else until -- bam!" Her wild gesture with her hands causes Dwight's bulging eyes to bulge even further.
"What... brought this on?" he chokes, as McHugh scrunches his lips into a funny shape and rolls his eyes in a fashion that indicates not me and you're fielding this one, buddy and have fun all at once.
Paige shows Dwight the pictures.
"I tried to think of a rational explanation. I mean, this is not a relative or a twin... Though I was adopted, I guess I could have a twin I don't know about. But everyone wouldn't be doing this weird dance for my sister, and besides, I remember. Not a lot, but... pieces, impressions? So... what did they do to me? Were there aliens? Government programs?"
She stares at him for a long time before he answers. It probably gets annoyingly pleading before the end.
But she sees him melting and pushes the advantage.
"There... may have been aliens," Dwight allows. She's close to something, but he retreats. "You should ask Nathan. This isn't -- I can't."
"Nathan isn't the boss of you, just because he's Police Chief," Paige retorts, and rides over Dwight's soft, weird snort, "I swear, the people in this town--"
"We were cut off for a while," McHugh says evenly. "You get tight loyalties, situation like that. Structures."
"I don't care about structures," Paige snaps. "This is about me. Look! She has my face. Her name was Audrey. And to think I always thought 'Paige' was bad..."
She curls her fingers sadly over the photos. In more than half of them, she is with Nathan. In some he looks happy. She thought she knew what happy looked like on him; thought she had teased it out. But he looks far happier in the photos than she has ever seen him look in the flesh.
"Was that what hurt him so much, when he lost her?"
She pauses on a photo, pointedly. In it, her phantom double is standing with Dwight. He can't claim ignorance or innocence.
"No. Yes. It's... more complicated than that." Dwight's struggling, and she realises it's Nathan he's trying to protect in this equation. He wants to let Nathan be the one to tell her. "Look, you're not some kind of sleeper assassin. Nothing like that. Maybe you should just let things be. You're Paige now. You're in love with Nathan. You're helping this town get back on its feet. That's all that matters. The hunt for identity never did her any good."
Paige brushes the pad of her thumb over her own tiny face. "Do you mean me, when you say 'her'?"
"...Not really." A gruff grunt. "You're you."
"It could be easier on everyone if you do it," McHugh suggests to Dwight. "Get it out in the open, over and done with."
"You tell me," Paige encourages the slightly smaller huge man, quick to jump into the opening.
"Oh no." McHugh raises his empty hands, the same time as Dwight says, "Don't do it."
This town was torn apart. She came with James, for a new start, for her, but also to be a part of the rebuilding. Somehow she can't help but equate the town's state of damage with Nathan. She's spent the months she's been here trying to rebuild them both. People died here, though, in circumstances they don't talk about, and there are all sorts of unhealed wounds, and she must be careful lest she do further damage.
Her head aches dully. "All right," she sighs. "I don't know if I'll ask today. I think maybe I want to think about this more on my own before I approach Nathan at all."
He must have a reason for not telling her. People died here, and this town is so full of secrets. She's almost not surprised to discover that she's one of them.
***
It's not unusual that Nathan's house is haunted. So is all of Haven. Paige keeps finding ghosts of herself all over town.
They wanted volunteers to sort out the archives of the old Haven Herald newspaper, and help the new fellow Glyn McDermot, who the Teagues cousin from out of town sold the business to, so that he can get a local paper up and running again. Nathan didn't want her to do it. Three days into the effort she found out why.
Paige sits in Nathan's living room, still in that oasis of time where he hasn't come home yet and James is quiet, actually sleeping, which he hasn't been for the most of this week. She pokes the photocopied clippings around on the coffee table.
Last night she dreamed of making love to Nathan on the beach, and in the back of some type of flashy classic car she's never been in. Only it wasn't a fantasy, too real for that. The date in the clipping that resonates with the memory is 1955. Even if she keeps being born again and again and coming back to this town, how does that explain Nathan? Unless they're two of a kind who come back and collide and collide through different lives. Only this Nathan is still living in the last one, and hasn't died and been reborn yet to fit her.
It's not actually the craziest theory she's entertained.
A breeze tickles the photo that says Officer Audrey Parker polices the flower show underneath, even though there's no draft, no breeze. She watches the photo's corners peel up and the whole thing inch a little nearer to her across the table.
"I know," she says, covering the cutting with her palm and looking around guiltily, though she knows Nathan isn't back because she's on tenterhooks to frantically hide the cuttings the moment she hears the door. Nathan won't entertain the idea of having a ghost. "Did you know her too?"
It's the photo that says the most emphatically that even if this was her, she was radically different then. Audrey Parker in the picture has a gun, even though she's only patrolling flowers. Paige doesn't begin to know how she feels about that.
The string of primary coloured plastic policemen and firemen across the top of James' crib jingles, like someone just gently ran a finger along them.
"Did you know me? Don't wake James," she adds, and looks around for something else to use. She's seen enough fakey ghost shows on TV to know how this works. Nathan has a singing bowl on the side of a shelf that he never touches, which is a weird thing for Nathan to have anyway. She gets up and puts it on the table in front of her. The bowl sings the quietest note with no-one touching it.
"Are you a man or a woman?" Paige asks, feeling intimidated, now she has the means, by the prospect of interrogating a ghost. The question sounds stupid to her ears. There's no response, and she realises she needs to frame her questions with the potential for a yes/no answer or this isn't going to work. "Make it chime if you're a man," she adds, and listens to the note's soft exhale.
"Did you know me?" she asks again, and the bowl sings. "You were someone who was living in Haven before, when Audrey was living here?" The noise should be tiny but it rises like a storm. James whuffles and shifts and gives a faint cry.
Paige finds her limbs trembling. Communicating with the dead takes its toll. She goes to the crib to pick up James, whose blinking eyes seem confused by more than just gas. It was a mistake to pick him up with that tremor still running through her. He senses it and only starts to cry more. She puts him back down in the crib, making hush noises, and brings the crib to place next to her when she sits back down on the sofa.
"I'm going to read to James," she tells the ghost, taking the book she left on the arm of the plush couch, pages spread upside-down. A literary crime, it's true, but nobody has ever been able to break her from the habit. "And to you, since you're here, and I doubt it's very exciting sitting around invisibly like this... Let's see..." She flicks the pages uneasily and thinks about which poems might get a reaction out of the ghost. She settles on one she has the trace of an excuse to read. "Are you like Nathan, a Tennyson man?"
In truth, Nathan had not liked anything so much as he seems to like the sound of her voice reading. He affects a constipated expression for most of the subject matter. It's the same expression he wore when he realised Paige intended to fill his living room with wall-to-wall books after his whirlwind offer that she should move in. She has found a certain pool of things that she judges by minute changes in that expression are Acceptable, though he never verbally acknowledges it.
Paige settles back and starts to read. James gurgles and quiets, long attuned to rhythm and meter and finding his restfulness in it, from the very day he was born.
The ghost is too quiet, and she wonders if he's gone, bored, and she should've chosen a poem that was shorter or less pompously flowery. Though as she reaches the last cluster of lines, "we are not now that strength which in old days moved Earth and Heaven", the table rattles in agitation as if he's tired of her point.
Paige stops reading. "I think you were a hero of this story, too." She waits for any reaction, but there is none. "I think you were all the heroes of some big story, and now here am I, stuck in the Epilogue."
She frowns. "But I'm not sure you're really the overblown heroics type." If there's a vibe of personality she gets from the ghost, it's far more irreverent than that. She gets up, puts the poetry anthology down on the coffee table, goes to the bookshelf. "Let's try some magic and hijinks... A Midsummer Night's Dream..."
The book she left on the table is spiralling through pages fast, of its own accord. It stops after a moment, and she slowly lets out her held breath before stepping closer to see where it landed. The Rime of the Ancient Mariner.
"Is this expressing a preference, or a message?"
Nathan's friend Duke had loved the sea.
She watches the string of public service workers dance on James' crib. When they settle, James keeps laughing, but it's at something she can't see. Children see and hear things that adults can't detect.
"Are you Duke?" The bowl sings loud.
The front door opens with a crunch that seems to split the air. She feels the ghost go into retreat, even while her heart is lurching and she grabs for the scattered clippings and photos to sweep them all up and hide them inside the thick book. She's just replaced it on the shelf when Nathan walks in.
***
Children aren't the best repository for secrets: conspiracies struggle to find traction on that ground. Even so, Haven breeds them formidably tight-lipped. But it's the after school writing club that provides the first chink in the dam.
Paige is trained and more than willing to assist when it comes to providing extracurricular activities as a bandage to the town's months of trauma, filling the silence of the hours, the gaps in the classrooms and the neighbourhoods.
Candle, is the prompt. Ten minutes' freeform writing. At the high end of the spectrum, church candles, memorial, rebirth. At the low end, raw survival and fire and light, the dawn of technology, the nights after the power went that Paige knows must have happened. It's a little, flickering potential for a breakthrough, not meant to rage like a pyre.
She isn't ready for, 'When the darkness came, we huddled around candles and flashlights, anything that was left. We daren't go to sleep. I saw Tomas Biddle get eaten by the dark when he got pushed too far from the edge. We had to sit all night in the classroom with his bones. Mrs Faraday wrapped them in a coat and tried to hide them so we couldn't see, but we all knew he was still there, in pieces under her desk.'
It's not the graphic, visceral content that shocks her (though it would), but how Paige remembers it.
Huddling in the dark around those little lights. Adults, children, friends, enemies.
Grayson. Murderers... They killed a man in front of her. She sees his white bones in the dark beyond the door, the way Tomas Biddle's bones must have looked... only... those smaller...
Paige can't hold in her little gasp or stop herself covering her mouth with her hand.
"I'm sorry, Miss," Meredith Lentil whispers. "People don't like talking about it..."
This is not a fiction, Paige thinks.
There's a fortitude with the memories. She doesn't like to call it callousness, but it's still the calluses formed over Audrey's mind that she was not a stranger to such horrors. She prefers to think of it being Paige, in her own compassion, who responds firmly, "You can talk to me about anything you want. I know it was very terrible, in the dark."
The girl nods seriously, blinking back tears, and mushes her lips together with childish determination that makes Paige's heart ache.
Audrey was a warrior, thinks the seated-watcher part of her at the back of her mind, while she talks softly to the children in the present. In the flashback, Audrey had a gun and faced up to the killers and forced them to stop.
Paige is not that.
She wonders, behind how many stares do the people around her remember Audrey and yearn for a lost hero? Paige cannot be a warrior, and wouldn't want to be.
Like the unveiled fiction of her remembered past, she's beginning to realise the wider fiction. There was no hurricane, or if there was, it was no normal hurricane.
"Miss, do you remember the trees that drank blood? I still have nightmares--"
"Miss Paige, the flying sharks, and invisible monsters, they won't ever come back--? Mom said you'd gone away to make sure they wouldn't ever, but then you came back..."
"Miss Paige--"
"Miss Paige--"
"Miss Audrey--"
The memories don't come on command for every prodding question, but she gets a few more rising surges, until her head is banging and she can't wait for the after-school session to end, for parents to come collect their children. She can't very well wrap up and abandon them all here ahead of time.
She goes home to Nathan in a daze. Unlocks the white door of his yellow house and the small action rolls out and throws echoes back at her. She unlocks and unlocks and unlocks, in different clothes she'd never wear, with a gun at her hip, with some ominous threat on her tail. That turn-and-click is a microcosm of her relationship with Nathan, with Haven, always too familiar from the start
She feels different, after the deluge from the children. The things she remembered can't be put back in the box. They're part of her now, indelible.
Nathan looks up from what looks suspiciously like a police report (there is a Solemn Agreement that there will be no work on actual home time, when he's not actively called away from her to something that she understands he cannot duck). He instantly drops the papers on the table and straightens, then gets up all the way and steps toward her. "Are you alright?"
Suddenly her patience with the softly-softly disintegrates. "I've been here before. She was called Audrey, and you loved her, too."
He flinches like she hit him, and she'd never do that. Paige regrets the outburst on the instant.
But a measure of hurt still coils in her belly, catching her off-guard when it pounces. "Were you always waiting for me to become her again?"
"You are her," he says, and struggles, and musters even as she has no idea what she actually feels, "You're still you."
"Are we talking about essence? Spirit? Soul?" Paige responds. "Because in terms of actual traits--"
She cannot imagine carrying a gun, using threat or force as solution.
I was made for peace-time . The flash-thought makes her blink and back off a step. If Audrey was their promised hero, Paige is something else.
"Audrey--" Nathan, thinking she is in retreat from him, lunges with an ill-thought plea, and the ghost drops a stack of bills and unopened junk mail from the top of the fridge onto his head. He staggers sideways and hits the table, momentarily blinded by the face full of paper, and goes down on one knee.
Paige gives a yelp of dismay and runs to help.
"Paige," Nathan corrects, realising his error. Paying more attention to that than his bleeding wrist, skinned on the table corner.
"It must have been very hard," she muses -- a fraction tritely. "Not saying it all this time." She takes his wrist in her hands, either side of the scrape, and looks around for something to staunch the blood.
"I love you," he says, putting emphasis on that last word.
"I know." He had welcomed her into his life so quickly, but kept high walls and iron barred gates up around some private core of grief. She sees that core breached now, with the revelation of the secrets this situation forced him to keep. A beginning, anyway.
He rubs his thigh where it hit the chair, and gives a subdued growl, half under his breath, "God damn it, Duke."
Something whispers through his hair, stirring the soft, light-brown ends of his outgrowing cut.
"He misses you," Paige says. "It's about time you acknowledged him."
Nathan clutches the edge of the table and averts his face just for a few seconds, like a turtle ducking into his shell, before bringing it back up. He's still on one knee, looking up at her with the glitter of moisture in his eyes as he murmurs, "I missed you both."
***
It isn't that he wanted Audrey more (though he probably also did), but either way he couldn't talk to her about real things, and after all he'd been through, stifled silence with the partner who'd shared his experiences was an unusual cruelty. The secrecy was for her own good -- the headaches from remembering Lucy, the first time -- but probably a little bit for his, too. After everything he had been through, after thinking he'd lost her for good, how could he ever muster the emotional fortitude to risk losing her by voicing the insane truth?
When she acknowledges to him, to herself, the things that are as they are, and that she isn't going to leave Nathan, things start to feel better, more solid. They're stronger together. A family, complete with baby and ghost. A normal, regular kind of family in Haven.
Paige tells Dwight that Nathan knows, in Haven Joe's Subterranean Bakery and Coffee Shop on a rainy Thursday lunchtime. She sees the relief in his eyes. Then she sees his eyes narrow, and he asks, "Do you know?"
"I'm remembering some things." Paige narrows her eyes back. It probably looks more like a short sighted squint on her, and he deserves a more convincing glower, when what he actually means is are you Audrey? "You know I'll never be her. Not exactly the same. Not even if I remember everything."
She's pretty sure about that. Surely the experiences she has had which are not Audrey -- a lifetime's memories of Not-Audrey -- would continue to define her even if all Audrey's memories returned.
Dwight sighs. "I'm sorry. It's... hard. I like to think... there had to be a reason, that she chose to do this. More than him." Nathan. "Audrey fought so hard to be just precisely who she was at the end."
Paige blinks.
"Sometimes," he adds, "you're nothing like her at all."
Audrey might have offered some glib quip, or an attention-diverting joke to take the tension out, or faced the accusation head-on to challenge it. Paige sees no need to.
"I just wish I knew why she did it," Dwight says again, and buries his face in his cream-and-syrup-and-sprinkle-topped latte.
She loved Nathan. Paige ponders. While on the surface an obvious answer, love is no altar to sacrifice identity upon. Nathan loved Audrey. Nathan and Paige at the beginning were held together by luck, determination and the metaphorical sticky-tape of half-baked instinct.
"When I remember," Paige tells him, "I'll let you know." Her heart beats in rhythm of that found mantra, I was made for peace-time. She sips her coffee to calm herself and takes a moment, letting her eyes wander around the sunken coffee shop. Haven Joe is a determined marketer. The roof of the building is at ground level, but steps have been dug out, along with the shafts sunk to let a little light in through the buried windows. Paige is a little incredulous with herself now that she accepted a hurricane as an adequate explanation for all of this damage. "Now, how's McHugh? Has he mastered those cupcakes that Lizzie likes yet?"
There is nothing quite like the image of McHugh in a flour covered baking apron to lighten conversation in any circumstance.
***
Audrey's memories return in full in the middle of a restless night. It's their first night back in bed together after a two-day waking nightmare, following Nathan getting shot by some idiot from the Guard who doesn't understand the concept, the Troubles are over.
Paige should have foreseen that would bring out the warrior spirit, Audrey coming back in a blaze of fury to protect.
Paige did not move to grab the gun, nor strike the man, but flung herself down between them, plastering herself over Nathan's fallen form before he could shoot again; babbled pleas and spun out all the justifications and understanding she could bring to bear until the gunman was also on his knees sobbing.
It happens between one half-drowsing moment and the next, as Nathan mumbles and shifts next to her, then makes a soft sound of pain at the movement. She transitions to instant wakefulness with her head full of all the other times she almost lost him. Times he almost died, times he did die, and she really shouldn't have to move onto a second hand to count the latter.
The memories are only a revelation for a moment, then they're a part of her she can't disentangle again ever.
"Nathan..." She frames his name on her lips without sound, and touches the unmarked skin above the white bandaging on his side. She remembers leaving him, watching him walk away down the steps from the Armoury.
"Parker..." he groans, his fingers unconsciously chasing her touch.
She called herself 'Lexie' once, a lie under a lie. It was very confusing, so newly-reborn. Paige is still uppermost, even if they'd rather have their archetypal warrior. As Audrey, she might still have talked down the Guard man, she realises. Though she might have swept his gun arm to the side as it dipped in reaction after the first shot, kicked him in the groin, and swept her other arm upward to slam the heel of her palm against the underside of his jaw.
"No," she says gently, stroking Nathan's undamaged ribs. "It's Paige."
With two complete sets of memories cohabiting one brain, she wonders if it's the choice of name that shapes the identity more than anything. A framework of words, stories told to self, names are often believed to hold primal power. She remembers choosing to be Audrey pretending to be Lexie. She remembers being Audrey. She remembers precious things that were hidden from her before, and because she has changed she can't regret them, but maybe also because of the value of those memories. She can't regret all the different shades of growing to love Nathan that were bypassed second time around by some unconscious internal programming. They have history now.
So does Haven. She remembers Duke... and although many of the memories are uncomfortable, challenging, bad, there are so many things she would never trade. This sadness could never be exchanged for never having known him at all, not remembering all that Duke sacrificed.
And now she properly knows who she's talking to, who's floating around their house.
Paige sighs into Nathan's shoulder, careful of his injury. His right arm wriggles under her to curl around her, regardless of his injury. She's not working blind in the dark anymore, but the heaviness that comes with Audrey's memories is an ache. It was easier being just Paige.
She hears movement from James, in the nursery, and carefully worms her way out from Nathan's grasp. Padding from room to room in the dark, barefoot, she finds the toys dancing on the edge of James' cot, and her baby who was a few minutes ago crying that quiet cry that's a warm-up to much bigger things, is now chuckling and poking stubby hands at the toys that move on their own.
Thanks, Duke. She opens her mouth, but the words don't come. She curls her hands on the bar of the cot and stares down at her son.
...Can this really be James Cogan?
James Cogan was a man, who'd already lived and died. Died young, but had a life, loves and adventures and a journey of his own. It would be strange to imagine that had somehow been undone. She thinks about the movement of time in the Barn and supposes there might be another option.
She can't answer that question for sure, any more than she can answer Dwight's. She remembers Croatoan, Vince, saying goodbye to Nathan. Going into the Armoury. Her own memories -- Paige's -- start after, placing the rest of the story a whole lifetime distant. The time spent in the Armoury remains a white blank.
Morning finds her sitting with James in the kitchen, rocking him on her lap, having decided she isn't going to think about that question, at least. She loves her son, whoever he is. Nathan eases in through the door, moving like it pains him. She meant to go check on him before now. Duke pulls out a chair before Nathan has to overreach to do it, allowing him to fold gratefully down into it.
"I remember everything," Paige tells him neutrally.
His eyes lift but it's with wary confirmation and not the traitor joy that she feared. "I thought... You're never so relaxed about being called the wrong name." He's quiet a moment. "It was still the wrong name, though."
"I'm choosing to stay Paige," is how she frames it. There has to be a reason. She frees a hand and reaches out across the table top to clasp his; to soften the blow, if such it is.
Nathan says, "I know who you are."
Paige finds cavernous depths in the reassurance of his steady voice. She leans over the table to kiss him, and when his lips part to accept hers it feels different and the same, infused by more desperation and too many terrible and fraught goodbyes. But he clasps his good arm around to hold her with a new -- no, it's an old conviction, newly returned.
Surely coming back like this, she made things more difficult for Nathan and herself than they needed to be.
She thinks back to Dwight's question. Why would she? Thinks about the things she surrounded herself with here, her books and her baby, her causes, her goals, her past life and this one in stark contrast. I was made for peace-time.
She was. Nathan wasn't, isn't, not yet. Dwight, McHugh, Gloria, the rest of Haven, they're still struggling to find the rhythm of living in peace.
She doesn't remember the decisions she made in the Armoury that would give her absolute answers. She doesn't think she ever will. For all she knows, it was so very dull in there, and Croatoan and Vince were driving her up the wall, and she couldn't take another moment of it.
She prefers a different tale. One where she came back, and came back this way, because she could see how they were struggling, unable to rest from all their strife and travel, and there was so much work still to do to rebuild. She has come back and back to Haven to help them fight the Troubles for centuries. The first thing she did this time -- after meeting Nathan -- was to join the Rebuilding Committee. After the war is over, when the storm has passed, a different kind of work begins.
Maybe she could tell already back there that even if she could have found a way to come back to them as Audrey Parker, she would struggle and flounder the same ways that they were. Maybe Paige was as much a gift to herself as to Haven. She chooses to believe that she was a gift and not a sacrifice, that she chose to return renewed with the tools to salvage and rebuild, a part of the solution lest she become part of the problem.
After all, she has been the warrior guardian of Haven for a long time. It's probably time to turn over a new leaf.
She holds Nathan's hand and her sleeping baby. Together they sit up and watch the dawn stream in through the kitchen windows.
END
ENDNOTE: This fic probably wouldn't have happened if Katta and her story in progress hadn't started me on the track of thinking about Paige as a character in her own right. Some of the thoughts in here very likely had their genesis in having read that (as yet unposted) work.
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