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The twisting plants outside Mrs Scacchi's door have turned black and are snapping at neighbours as they pass. Nathan leans down and marvels at their little needle-sharp teeth. His partner warns, "Don't get too close," just as he reflexively pulls back. The black bud chomps the air inches from his nose.

"Margery Brooklea said they tried to eat her poodle," Nathan says, aware that he's less inclined to sympathy with that than any responsible Police Chief should be. Mrs Brooklea's dog is a vicious ball of white fur and terror of all ankles in Haven -- and maybe the plants have gorged themselves on Sweetie, as they seem sated and lethargic now.

"Does she only do flowers?" Audrey wonders aloud.

A moment later, she's hunkering down, poking a pen from her pocket into the soil where the former flowers grow. She draws it out with a caterpillar -- about the spikiest, evillest looking caterpillar Nathan's ever seen -- moving on the end of it, and answers her own question. "Apparently not." She pulls a face, tapping the pen with increasing firmness against the wall until she finally manages to dislodge the spiky sucker. "Ew."

"Can we see the killer plants, Mister Chief?" Turning, Nathan finds a trio of kids from the street clustered at the low gate. Approaching along the road behind them--

"Yeah, Mr Chief. Can we see 'em?" That familiar voice, far too cheerful. A figure with straggly hair and bagging clothes, bringing along the salt smell of the sea and a new distinct scent, like metal and blood, that Nathan has only begun to notice very recently.

"Duke," he greets in distaste. "Tell me you're not still pretending to be a cop this week." Which isn't completely fair, because even he could admit Duke had saved a woman's life a few days ago, but he definitely wasn't ready to start employing the dangerous nuisance and have to put up with watching over his shoulder full-time.

"Nope. One round of almost getting killed in the line of duty was enough for me." Duke spreads his hands. "Problem at the Gull needs Audrey's input. It can wait. Mrs Scacchi been gardening again?"

"If it's a police problem, phone it in. If not... go wait back there." Nathan eyes the kids. "You go home, too."

"But there's Sam's ferrets," the short kid in a red T-shirt pipes up, nudging one of his companions hard with an elbow. "He don't dare open the cage to feed them. Ain't it illegal, turning people's pets into monsters, Chief Wuor-nos?" The kid struggles a bit with his last name. "Will you arrest Mrs Scacchi?" His voice clearly announces that such a thing happening on their quiet street would be awesome.

"You can show us your ferrets," Audrey says. "In just a while. Have you seen anything else strange?"

"There's a tree on old Bunty's patch," says the nudged kid, Sam. "And Macey's doghouse ate the dog."

Duke's as wide eyed and interested as any of the kids, and standing with them at the gate in shorts, hands stuffed in pockets, he doesn't look out of place as the fourth member of their band.

Inside the house, the curtains twitch. Nathan sighs, straightens, and raises his knuckles to the door. "Parker." Warningly. Advance warning. He thinks Audrey must've had an encounter or two with Lacey Scacchi in the spring, but if he's wrong about that, they're too late for explanations now.

Bolts draw back and the door opens as far as a chain will allow. "Go away," says a flaying whip of a woman's voice. Not Mrs Scacchi; her daughter. "Stop poking around in Ma's garden. She's sick. Tell those kids to leave us alone."

"Arlene?" Nathan tries reason, leaning his face into the gap so she can see him. "It's Nathan Wuornos... that's Haven P.D., Arlene. Open the door, please. We need to talk about your Ma's... plants."

"I'll say," Audrey murmurs.

"You saying I have to let you in?" Arlene asks.

"Less paperwork, same outcome," Nathan says. It's not the first time something like this happened, and he and Arlene go way back to childhood.

The inside of the house has changed. Mrs Scacchi's a hoarder of weird ephemera and it's never been tidy, but before it was always its own brand of arranged. It looks like months since the place was cleaned. Layers of grime have set in. The smell catches in the back of his throat, overpowering for a moment, until Audrey nudges him onward, her touch bringing him back to himself.

"I told you." Arlene didn't miss his reaction, or Audrey's dismay. "Ma's sick. She doesn't need visitors."

"Sorry," Nathan finds himself saying, coming to the conclusion 'sick' is a euphemism. He knows the smell of a place housing the bedridden and dying. He'd not heard the old woman was on her way out, but if her direct line to the outside world is Arlene... Arlene's cagey and always has been. Made that way by the world. "We still need to ask about the plants."

She leans over and hisses in his face, far too close, "Wait a damn week and time'll fix that problem for you."

She's thin, as tall as he is, rigid and straight. A year ahead of him in school, she'd occupied the same role of class freak as he had for the year below, though she wasn't Troubled so far as he knew. She was just odd, brittle and reactive. Got it from her mother-- and if you looked at it like that, she'd never had a chance.

The old lady's in bed, in the living room, despite the house having an upper floor and a stair lift. She's more alert than Nathan expected, clutching a TV guide and peering blindly in the gloom. "Arlene? I hear you talking to someone?" If the daughter's voice is bad, the mother's could strip paint. But it has a trembling fragility in it now. A bowl of lilies on the far mantelpiece sway, their tips silvery cones terminating in spikes, leathery petals shivering like flesh. Repulsed, Nathan swallows and tries to put the reaction aside.

"Mrs Scacchi? Officer Audrey Parker, Haven P.D. We need to talk to you about the plants," Audrey says slowly. Under the bed, the old lady's black cat swishes its tail. When it opens its mouth to mewl at them, Nathan sees row upon row of pronounced, razor-sharp fangs lining a maw the colour of blood that's surely far bigger than it should be. He steels himself to touch Audrey's shoulders and manoeuvre her away from it.

"Those fucking things," the old lady sneers at the lilies. "Like people think I'm dead already. Wishful thinking! They're hoping for it, all of them."

Audrey looks staggered by the language. Mrs Scacchi's generation... the little old lady in her cottage with her cats... is not supposed to talk like that. It gets everyone, first time.

"Who is it, out there?" she demands. "Brooklea woman and her mutt again? I can hear 'em whispering at the gate."

"Just kids," Nathan says.

"Nathan Wuornos." She crooks her finger at him. He edges closer, for her to squint up and down his frame. "Huh. How's your father?"

He's caught. Does he lie and risk this being a trap? How much will it upset her to know if she did forget that Garland Wuornos has been dead for months? He really doesn't want to upset her.

"Still lost at sea, Mrs Scacchi," he manages, hoarsely. He can't see her face as she lowers her head and slowly crumples the corners of the TV guide between her gnarled fingers.

Arlene went to the curtains when her ma asked about the people outside. She stands there, now, with one hand holding them back, letting in sunlight that the old lady leans away from, covering her face like a corny old movie vampire. "You came with Duke Crocker?" Arlene asks, though the question that's actually in there is a different one. She just holds the curtain and stares, ignoring her ma raising hell about the brightness. Nathan thinks he catches a glimpse of Duke staring back.

"Duke came looking for us," he qualifies. "I don't think he knew you were here."

Arlene lifts her hand in a slow wave. It's not shy, not hesitant, just -- Arlene. While he doesn't know how much they've seen of each other in the years since, Nathan does know they screwed like bunnies back in High School, all through her sixteenth year and Duke's fifteenth.

He definitely sees Duke wave back. The kids wave, giggle and whisper, climbing up on the gate for a better view, and Duke peels them off one by one and sends them packing, the truce broken.

"Shut that fucking curtain," Mrs Scacchi squawks. Nathan doesn't remember her talk like that extending to Arlene before, but from Arlene's reaction it's not new. She does as asked and walks back, her eyes quietly steely, a tight smile playing the edge of her lips. It's hard to think of someone being made happy by the sight of Duke.

"You remember Dukie," she says. Between her fingers, she sheds a branch torn from another dead plant on the windowsill, scattering the white skeletons of blossoms. Nobody would dare call it a nervous habit. "Handsome little Duke. We used to go dancing." She was still several inches taller than Duke, back when they dated, and when they did dance, had a tendency to lead. Nathan remembers finding that pretty funny.

"Sex fiend." Her mother declares judgement. "A crook, now. A goddamned Crocker crook. I remember. I told you to stay away. His kind never were any good."

You had to wonder how many of Haven's older residents know at least some shadow of the truth about the Crockers, and Nathan feels foolish that he never twigged to it, never realised it was about more than Simon the drunk and Duke the smuggler. He can't fault her description, though. She's got Duke down.

"I know you grew to like him in the end."

Nathan assumes this is a hitherto undiscovered definition of 'like'.

"I liked Fiona," Mrs Scacchi asserts, though the way she says it is like an insult. "The girl could cook."

No, the Scacchi women have never been ones to blend with smalltown tradition. Something else he has in common with Arlene, though she doesn't know it. The fact of his one night stand with Duke is known only to Audrey, now that Duke's wife Evi is dead.

"Fi moved to Las Vegas and married a stripper," Arlene reminds her. "You didn't like her then."

"I miss her pie," Mrs Scacchi grumbles, and it fades into a non-specific mumble and then that fades, too, and the old lady's asleep.

Arlene sighs. Her face came alive, briefly, but looks half dead and deathly tired again now, like her mother's ferocious hold is dragging her down into the grave on her heels.

"How long has she had her..." Audrey pauses and then opts for "Trouble?" rather than another euphemism that's only going to prove confusing in the circumstances.

"It's been around for the last few years. It only really kicked in like this when she started to get sick, though." Arlene sits down on the edge of the bed and rests her hands on her knees. She sits very still. The hard planes of her face resemble a rough-cut sculpture in rock. "She rarely speaks of it, but she had it when I was a child. The other neighbourhood kids would always be hanging over the fence." She casts her emotionless eyes toward the window, grimaces in a brief flash of human expression. "Taunting the 'witch'. You're Troubled." Turns on Nathan. "You'd know."

It's always been very difficult to hold her gaze. He nods, acknowledging.

Audrey asks, "Do you know how it works?"

"Usually it happens to things she doesn't like. She has no patience with living things. I think she tries -- she must hold back, because I've never seen her harm a person." Arlene's words are dry, but something in their plain-spoken directness asks for understanding. "She doesn't mean to. She can't help it. It... at least it's only little things." Her knuckles are white, twisted around the bald stem of the dead plant. She's afraid of something.

Audrey reaches out and touches Arlene's hands, folding them in her own after the first brief instant where Arlene could pull back, and doesn't. Nathan realises he's holding his breath and lets it out, trying not to make it audible.

"I'm so sorry. We can come back another time, since she's... tired now. But can you answer me one more thing?" Audrey flicks her eyes to Nathan knowingly. "Is it getting worse?"

***

"If Mrs Scacchi's Trouble gets more out of control the more her health deteriorates, I'm wondering how much of a problem this could grow into." Audrey's voice is so quiet it's almost a whisper, and Duke just about catches what she's saying as he watches his two cops step down the short path to the gate. Nathan barely looks at him, too distracted even to scowl. Duke figures that means this one is bad.

Nate responds, stiffly, "Like Arlene says, doesn't seem we have long to wait it out. I'm just hoping she's right about the rest and old Lacey doesn't jinx anything bigger than a cat."

"No, we definitely don't need to be dealing with Cujo, on top of everything else," Audrey agrees. She's tense, as well, but she's been that for days, and it royally sucks. Duke understands that, yeah, the news you're mysteriously disappearing in a month will do that to you, but he wants back the fun Audrey Parker. Then again, he also wants back the fun Duke Crocker, and if he can't figure out where he's gone to ground, what chance does he have for success on Audrey's behalf?

The kids haven't come back after he chased them off, but two women sidled up in their place. If they're outraged mothers, they haven't bothered to declare it. He recognises them, vaguely, because he hung out in this neighbourhood a lot when he was young. Mary Mercer, in a sky blue skirt and a prim white blouse. Sharyn Dickens in a green T-shirt, spray-on jeans and high heels. They look like they turned into their mothers. They hang at the fence, arms folded, and do their best to ignore him -- perk up, though, at the sight of Nathan.

The two harpies descend on Nate as he walks out, cutting him off from his back-up as Audrey is shutting the gate. "Are you here to do something about her?"

"We've complained. Do you even read Garland Wuornos' old box any more? There hasn't been a meeting in weeks."

"I read it. We're here." Nathan looks too pissed off by the harrying to ever make much of a diplomat. He should've done the sensible thing and bowed out gracefully when they offered him his dad's job.

"That old lady's been twisting this neighbourhood for years. Hateful old witch. Your food goes off. Your pets turn into... things you can't even imagine. Your plants wither and die, or warp into monsters."

"She's sick," Nathan states flatly. "She can't help it. Please, can we try some compassion?"

"She should be in an institution. Under guard."

"She's unnatural."

"Ladies," Audrey says, muscling in. She has to literally insert both elbows and pry the women apart to get anywhere near Nathan. "Right now, she's just a very fragile, sick old woman who has an unfortunate affliction she can't control. We're looking into helping her with it."

"If you don't do something," Mary Mercer says, stridently, waving a wooden spoon coated with icing at them, as they try to break clear and walk away, "We will. Enough is enough!"

Nathan stops. Turns. "If you harass that old woman, it's you who'll find yourself charged and, if necessary, in jail. I hope I make myself clear."

Okay, just this once, Duke's tempted to applaud Nathan. The declaration silences the women long enough for him and Audrey to get a good head start before a dual cacophony of high-pitched complaint bursts out. Duke remembers what he's doing and jogs after the cops.

"Hold up! So, old lady Scacchi and her demon shrubbery?" Duke prompts. Nathan gives him a pinched look. Not hostile, for once, just... a particular note of sombre. "She's dying? Oh, fuck. Arlene?"

"Seems to be coping. Look, you need to stay away from Mrs Scacchi. I know you helped rescue Daphne from the sea, but this isn't square with me yet. Let the old woman die in peace, naturally, and leave Arlene alone, or do I have to repeat the same threat I just made to them?" He jabs his finger back towards Mary and Sharyn. "Your brand of 'help' is not required here."

Duke slaps Nathan's hand out of the air, furious, stepping into the other man's space. "You don't get to tell me who I can and can't see. Jesus! I know her, too! I know her better. Nathan, you dick. I do not even believe half the things that come out of your mouth lately. I'm not going to kill Mrs Scacchi! I don't know what the hell you think I am anymore. And you can't stop me visiting Arlene."

He about-turns, ready to march up to the house. Audrey catches his arm. "Arlene doesn't want visitors," she says. "She's got too much else on her mind. I got the impression she might like to see you sometime, though, when it's all over." She doesn't spell out what. Arlene's mother is dying. Hell. "Come on, Duke -- we all know what it's like working under some fateful deadline. Weren't you here to ask me something?" She herds him ahead of her as they walk down the street, back towards his truck and Nathan's dinosaur.

Up ahead, Nathan's radio crackles and he lifts it. "Go, Laverne."

"Disturbance at the Gull," the smoky female voice chirrups. "By all accounts, this is one for Audrey. You both better get out there."

"Yeah." Duke raises his hand, lamely, like back in school. He catches up as Nathan stops to scowl at him, then circles Nathan and twists his face into a grin that he will freely admit he calculates just to annoy. "Technically, we only need the blonde one, but since the skinny stiff seems a permanent appendage..."

Nathan rams him with a rock hard shoulder, barging past to his Ford Bronco. "Least the noisy, annoying one has a reason to be hanging 'round us now."

***

In the Gull, about a dozen interested folks mill around a girl dressed in men's clothes, who's swearing worse than Mrs Scacchi, which makes for worse than Nathan's ever heard any woman swear in his life, and clutching her crotch. There's a heck of a lot of shouting. Most of it seems directed at another girl, who stands gawping rather than defending herself. Blonde, plain, neatly-turned-out in a floral skirt and white blouse. Nadine Palmer, Nathan pulls up from somewhere in the vast array of names and faces collected in fifteen years as a small town cop. Works for the insurance office.

He doesn't know everyone in Haven, but there look to be some definite strangers among the crowd. A few long distance truckers, passing through -- they'd only taken a couple months to suss the Gull as the best eatery for fifty miles around -- and others who look like tourists. If this is a Trouble, they don't need this much out-of-town attention.

"Where's my junk?" the loud woman wails. "What'd you do to me, you bitch?!"

"I don't know!" Nadine returns tritely. "But you obviously needed a lesson, you chauvinist pig, and if God's gone and struck you down for it, maybe in future you'll keep your hands to yourself!"

What--? Nathan eyes the angry woman again. Dressed like a man. Dressed like a trucker, in fact. Oh, hell.

Audrey's grinning, and really, Duke could be so good as to look rattled. In this town, pick the wrong girl for his advances and it's a surprise, really, this hasn't already happened to him. Unfortunately, Duke's not who it actually happened to last time. "Yeah, I know," Duke says. "I thought we already had the sex change Trouble, too. Are you related to Sean Caulk?" he presses Nadine suspiciously.

"Who?"

"Why are you acting like this is normal?" the trucker demands. "I was a dude this morning. I clearly remember waking up and--"

"Thank you... sir," Nathan cuts him/her off as a hand gesture makes it quite clear what he/she was about to launch into an energetic description of. "Haven is an unusual place. These things can... happen to the best of us."

"No," Duke says, contrarily. "It happened to you. Which, may I say, ranks up there as one of the more entertaining weeks of my life."

"We weren't talking about that ever again," Nathan reminds him. "At least, you weren't going to talk about that and I wasn't going to mention how you kept hitting on me even after you realised I wasn't my long lost sister."

Audrey's grin for the two of them is like the sun coming out, and something he hasn't seen in too long. It catches Nathan off-guard. Seeing her face light up again stops him in place and steals all the air from his lungs; a throwback to lighter times.

"Reflex," Duke postures defensively, grinning, and with the both of them at it, it really is like the clock's turned back a month, where they're all real friends and not this strained... whatever they are now. "You were weirdly hot... as a chick." He chews the proviso slyly around his mouth and then tags on another: "In a dykey, athletic, go-all-night kind of way."

"Thanks, Duke," Nathan aims for sarcasm but it comes out surly because he was never sure how to take that reaction.

Audrey hypothesizes, "You must really like women that can kick your ass."

She puts the faintest hesitation on the word women.

Duke protests, "He can not-- I still don't know how he took it so... calmly. That's calmly like a freakin' robot... hell, I'd have been out of my mind. One way or another. Lock up the Gull, Duke Crocker is on vacation for a week."

"Doesn't matter what parts you have if you can't feel them anyway."

"Sheesh." Point of fact, Nathan can't feel Duke pat his shoulder in masculine camaraderie, either. "Sorry, man. Still... you, a mirror, lots of spare time. And I did offer to help."

Audrey's trying not to crease up, but trucker lady's less than amused. "You people think this is funny?"

Nadine says, staring between Nathan and Duke, "I thought you guys were always fighting."

"Ma'am... Sir," Nathan corrects himself. "We will deal with your problem." He frowns at Audrey, pointedly. She needs to get her giggles under control and talk this out, because he is not going to play resident expert on this sort of Trouble for Duke's amusement. "Take it from me, it's survivable."

"Didn't you let Audrey fix your hair?"

"Duke. Enough." Half an hour of Audrey's hands massaging his scalp was about the finest thing he'd felt in years, so he doesn't particularly care what Duke thinks. But he is reminded that Duke is far too close to Nadine for his liking, and steps between them, setting a hand on her shoulder to push her gently back. "Nadine, you need to keep away from him. He's not safe." For our kind hangs unspoken and heavy, and probably louder for Duke than any of the rest of them.

Duke turns away, hands flying up in frustration. "God damn it, Nathan!"

Audrey stops having trouble controlling her mirth quite abruptly.

Nathan has a grim moment, acknowledging he caused that. Still, they have to keep the Troubled away from Crocker. That should include Nathan himself, as much as possible, though hell if Duke will stay away, and it definitely includes Nadine. It's for Duke's own good as much as theirs. You'd think Audrey would grasp that, since she pushed it as far as breaking point already.

Nadine looks between them with a frown of disapproval and a sigh. Nathan feels strange, for a moment. With his hand on her shoulder, something seems to pass through him that's almost a physical sensation. He glances down, ascertains he doesn't have breasts, and puts it down to imagination.

When he removes his hand and steps away from her, the world rushes in on him.

There's a healing break in one of his ribs that's been giving the doctors problems, high up in his back under his right shoulder blade, from when Duke blew him into the wall of the boat. He says 'the doctors' because, obviously, it's not been bothering him. It's the first thing that lands on him now, though, causing a sharp gasp to escape his lips. He's wrenched something in his knee, somehow, unknowing. One of his boots is rubbing the side of his big toe, the fabric of his clothes is too heavy and coarse, the air is surprisingly cold, and it's overwhelming, this time, not a slow re-emergence into sensation like Ian Haskell's Trouble gave him. The feel of his own weight pressing down his feet and his painful leg destroy his balance, though he catches himself on a table before he can drop further than one knee.

"Nathan!" Audrey exclaims. So does Duke, with much the same intonation. He waves Audrey off with one hand, but that doesn't stop Duke coming in from his other side and grabbing his shoulder to steady him.

He feels that. It's the first time in ages he's felt anyone's touch but Audrey's. He feels... and feels angry, because Duke's got no right, not now, to impose on him like that.

But Duke's staring at his hand on Nathan's arm with horrified, morbid fascination. He squeezes harder. It hurts, but Duke doesn't stop. "I..." He realises what he's doing and pulls his hand back. "...don't feel that," Duke finishes, blankly. "I can't feel anything."

***

This is not happening. Duke looks at Nathan, then at Nadine because that's where Nathan's looking. What, so he was joking -- and only joking, mind -- about wanting a taste of how the other half lives, and instead of girl-parts got Nathan's Trouble? That sucks. "What did you just do?" he demands.

"Me?" Nadine hops back from both of them. Their dual stance is kind of threatening at the moment, but Duke frankly doesn't care. "I didn't do anything! This is crazy. This freaking town! Everyone's always all, like 'ooh, the Troubles...' 'I crashed my car because of the Troubles... oh, no, I can't prove it, big surprise.' It's Haven's own scam, that's all!"

"You just did it," Duke explodes. "Me and him -- you touched him. Was she touching you when you got changed?" He swings around on the girl trucker.

"Yeah, well, I was tou--"

"Right." He snorts at the demonstrating grabby hands -- tempted, definitely, to call that one self-inflicted, but he and Nathan weren't doing anything. Except, well, fighting. Which is what they do.

He can't feel his feet on the floor, can't feel his legs holding him up. It's like he's floating in his body. He moves his arm to grasp Nadine, like he did Nathan, and knows his arm is moving, but he has to look to assure himself he's actually made contact. He can feel a ghost of pressure, or at least knows there's something preventing his hand pressing further, but that's all. Of the brush of the thin fabric of her shirt, the warmth of her body underneath, there's nothing. He lets go, appalled. "Sorry. I didn't--" Like this, he has no idea if he hurt her or not.

Nathan, whose fault this is, finishes climbing to his feet, fending off Audrey's concern. "No. I'm okay. Just took me by surprise." He's also starting to smile, though he won't be in a moment.

"Nate. Nate. Nathan--" Duke supposes the guy's got more signals than usual fighting for his attention to explain his temporary deafness. Nathan looks, finally -- cross and then more forgiving as his expression clears a bit, and Duke is reminded that Nathan is usually less of an asshole when he can feel. "If I've got your Trouble, then where's my thing?"

Nathan's mild expression crashes into something very sour indeed.

"...Yeah," says Duke. "Yeah, that." He wants rid of the Crocker legacy, but this? Too steep a cost by far. Why can't Nathan's Trouble be one of those silly, pointless, harmless things like making walls glow or pencils float, instead of the sucks-and-makes-your-life-miserable variety? He knows full well how Nathan feels about the Crocker family's murdering-the-Troubled shtick, but frankly, if it wasn't for this, Nathan could have it and good luck to him. Take his paranoid concerns and direct them in on himself, and let him be the one in charge of the damn curse. No better guard dog for it, right?

"Everyone calm down," Audrey says, wading in. "Duke, can you close the place up? I don't think we need this much attention."

Fine. He does that, hustling folks out, providing a couple of refunds and doggy bags to go, dismisses his too-curious staff and changes the notice on the door. Nathan helps by silently flashing his badge around and glowering while Audrey picks over the story with the girl trucker and Nadine. The glances Duke swaps with Nathan throughout the process vary between suspicion, annoyance, and something that's none of the above. A lot of the time lately, it's been difficult to remember the intimacy he's shared with Nathan; that he's been inside that hard body and even seen some of the edges soften. Ever since his dad's fucking legacy came to light, it's like their whole history -- everything they knew about each other, everything they shared -- was erased from Nathan's mind, and all he expects Duke to be is the killer.

But last time Nathan could feel it was Duke he came to, if belatedly. Duke has to wonder what's going on inside that rock-like skull right now. Is that barely-there shake of the head he just got a rejection, or a not right now, or just telling him to stop making eyes and get on with shit?

When they're done, Audrey draws them back together. "Okay, we have two... transformations, I guess. We've got... John." She eyes the girl trucker carefully to make sure she got his name right. "The guy groping Nadine who got turned into a girl, and Nathan and Duke, you guys were arguing and got your afflictions -- presumably both -- swapped over. That makes me think this is some kind of tit-for-tat. Reciprocation. Poetic justice?" she tries, and winces a bit.

Oddly, Nathan beats them all to the protest. "It's not poetic. Parker, I can't be like this right now. My investigation of the Guard..."

Duke's eyebrows shoot up, but he'll chase that interesting slip another time. He might not fully understand the reference, but he can definitely get behind the sentiment. "I can't be like this, period. It's like I'm not even alive." He catches Nathan's scowl, but that hadn't been meant as a slur.

"I didn't even know they were 'afflicted'," Nadine protests. "For whatever that means! I told you, the Troubles are a scam. How could I do this? How would I know how to do it? I don't have any 'mysterious magical powers'." She air-quotes, and is therefore obviously evil. "I work in insurance!"

"Which is horrible, and I sympathise, but it doesn't exclude you from the ranks of the other damned," Duke says, his patience short. "Look, just touch me and think about it really hard. I will happily trade a pair of hooters for this shit, if grabbing your ass is what it takes. Sorry." He apologises to John, but yeah, it is a nice rack. To Nadine, he spreads his arms out from his body and stands ready. She tentatively pokes him. Nada. Audrey watches, a little perplexed, as Nadine pokes him harder, getting into it. It doesn't hurt, although he has the impression it was meant to.

"Okay--" Audrey grabs Nadine's finger as she really goes for the next try, pulling it briskly clear. "Somehow, I don't think it's going to be as simple as that."

Someone starts hammering on the door outside like they're trying to bust it down.

"Hey!" Duke turns and yells. "Closed! Learn to read!"

"Help! Oh, God, help!" The voice that pierces the banging is vaguely familiar as one of the regulars he just chucked out, newly edged with panic. It's not the only voice out there. Duke feels a chill wash over him that's obviously all in his mind as he realises people are screaming. "Please! It's coming for us! Let us in!"

"Let them in." Nathan, grim in crisis, goes to the door and yanks on the handle uselessly. Duke dives for the counter where he left his keys. Audrey's drawn her gun already and Nathan joins her as Duke takes his turn at the lock. Some of the voices outside have already changed into strange, distorted cries. The light coming from the windows is wrong, like the sun's flickering, threatening to go out. What's happening out there Duke can't even imagine. He's opening the door when it occurs to him it's already too late.

"What the hell?" Nathan, his voice choked and awful.

Outside, the world does look like Hell. A wasteland, blackened and fouled. They watch the man immediately outside the doorway transform into something out of a nightmare as the effect catches up to him.

Duke slams the door shut.

"Nathan! Duke!" Audrey's gasp is of utter horror, six steps ahead of them as usual, and no, it can't be much comfort to be immune as you watch that sort of thing happen to your friends. Her gun hits the floor and Duke feels his wrist grabbed and -- there's not a lot of time to process in the instant, but he feels it. Turning, he sees her snatch Nathan's hand. She squeezes her eyes closed and grips her fingers so hard it even hurts. Darkness sweeps across them, a stench of decay, a promise of horrors that nothing he's seen in Haven yet can compete with. Then, it's past them, and Audrey opens her eyes with a sharp breath.

Duke feels only numb but uses the relief in Audrey's eyes as his mirror to tell him he still looks the same.

"Parker?" Damn -- Nathan's still Nathan, too.

"I... don't know if I dare let go of either of you," she admits.

In the end, she doesn't have a choice. Behind them, there's a... thing. A thing that used to be Nadine, Duke thinks, trying to study it and not flinch away. Now, it's all teeth and grey flesh, ragged hair and a mouth full of fangs. It looks like Mrs Scacchi's plants.

"Nathan!" Audrey half shouts.

Of course it's Nathan who pulls loose of her and throws himself to intercept it. Duke has this theory that Nate's survival instincts were all wired backwards with his nerves. But he doesn't degenerate into something out of a Clive Barker novel when he breaks Audrey's grip. It seems that danger, at least, has passed. Their bodies clash and Nathan isn't so unmovable as usual, but he manages to hold the Nadine-thing. The gun lifts in his free hand.

"Don't kill her!" Audrey shouts, the source of her concern changing. It's the same instant Duke yells, just in case Nathan hasn't actually clicked to it, which would be understandable, "That's Nadine!"

The creature doesn't care, but Nathan hesitates and, shit. Duke grabs an empty bottle from a nearby table and moves before thought, bringing it down on the back of Nadine-thing's neck. It shatters, spraying out glass in a glistening arc.

Nadine flops against Nathan, who tries gallantly to catch her twisted form and lay her down. A stray droplet of her blood must touch his skin somewhere, because his whole body stiffens and stills as his eyes turn silver. "What--the--?" he grates, and Duke would swear even Nathan's voice has gone all 'Hulk smash'. The extra power makes his movements jerky as he tries to be gentle with the unconscious Nadine. Duke's never seen himself in this state, and it's shocking enough to see Nathan like it. The idea that Nathan, of all people, is getting to feel it from the inside is deeply unsettling. Duke has concerns about his Trouble that he hasn't mentioned to anyone precisely because he doesn't want to fuel Nathan's paranoia.

Then it passes and Nathan, hellishly disturbed, sags and scrubs his hands over his face. "That -- felt -- weird." Like he's still forcing each word out. A series of dragged-in breaths succeed in calming him somewhat. "What the hell just happened? I don't mean the fucking Crocker curse."

Well, they know now that Nadine is definitely Troubled.

"That. That was old lady Scacchi's Trouble. Magnified by a thousand." Duke peeps around the door, and then slams and locks it again. And shoves some tables in front of it for good measure. Indescribable things are wandering around out there. Things that used to be people, going by recent demonstration. "What has she done?"

Audrey looks overwhelmed in a way that Audrey Parker seldom does. She's staring out of the window, staring and not turning away, which could explain it. Duke does not want to look. "Mrs Scacchi's Trouble... twists the things around her. Everything she hates--"

"She hates everything." Nathan's low, unnecessary reminder.

"Well, everything has never turned into this before now." Duke looks around, and his attention fixes on John, cowering behind the bar. "Hey. Mrs Scacchi -- she hates out-of-towners as much as the next of you blinkered smalltown yahoos." He casts a pointed glance at Nathan. "How come that guy-gal escaped intact?"

"Maybe this time, she just thought that she hated Haven," Audrey tries. "Her neighbours--"

"That would mean every tourist and passer-through is now a witness." Nathan catches himself after the grave declaration and curses. "Witnesses? Why am I even -- How are we going to put this back? That's a wasteland out there, full of monsters!" His voice rises almost to a shout as he jabs his hand toward the window. "People are going to notice? People are going to die."

Audrey regards him carefully, though the sudden stressful explosion is one of his more forgivable, so far as Duke's concerned, given Nathan is supposed to be the man in charge of this mess. From the look of him, that awareness is just descending. Continuing with the kid gloves, Audrey picks her words carefully as she says, "Maybe if we can stop Mrs Scacchi's Trouble, all of this will reverse." Nathan might be too distracted to read her thoughts. Duke's just glad that whatever happens is out of his hands this time. No switch-back at least until Nadine's herself again, and that puts this responsibility, too, smack into Chief Wuornos' hands. Let the self-righteous ass swallow that.

Though Duke feels a little sick at himself for thinking it, he still can't wait to see how that goes.

"We need to get back to Mrs Scacchi," Audrey declares.

Duke notices something, and steps in close to the wall to run his fingers across a dark blemish. The wood crumbles, rot and insects tumbling out. He shouts a curse and leaps back, stumbling over something he doesn't feel. It's not just people and living things. Even the goddamn infrastructure--

"Duke!" Audrey's warning as he struggles to rise alerts him to the glass on the floor from the broken bottle. He's bleeding. Shit. He doesn't even know where that's coming from. Duke runs a quick body-check. Glass is embedded in the palm of his hand and -- oh, yeah. There's a big splinter of it sticking out of his ass. He takes back almost every snide, sarcastic word he's ever said about Nathan because of his Trouble. This sucks. It sucks, and what sucks worse is how the fact he doesn't even know his own body any more has to be so far down the list of all the things that are wrong with today.

***

Nathan makes some effort to ignore Audrey picking glass out of Duke, still trying to process what happened when Nadine's blood touched him. A spot on his neck -- he felt it burn like acid as it landed, and then a rush spread from there over the rest of him, as his skin seized the blood and welcomed it in. For that instant he felt like he could do anything, his own heartbeat a roar in his ears, strength pouring through him, a crazy aggression that wanted to pound, maim, kill. He had what he knew was Nadine Palmer in his arms at the time, so he didn't. Now, he feels like he has a monster inside him: trigger it and all hell lets loose.

He's been worried about Duke (what he might do to other Troubled people) and he's been worried for Duke (what he might turn into), but it occurs to him he might have been missing an ounce of emotional compassion for what Duke's actually going through dealing with this crap.

But it's not the time for apologies, and he's feeling as twisted and disturbed inside as the rest of Haven is outside.

Part of him thinks he could use this to help save Haven. It doesn't seem possible they won't have to fight to get back across town, with monster plants and distorted creatures made from townsfolk, it must be a jungle out there. But he's being whispered to, seduced, by an insidious power that above all else wants to be used. A power made to destroy the Troubles via the Troubled. That's people -- him, dad, Dwight, Jordan...

He can't even imagine what Jordan would think if he approached her like this. Not just able to feel the excruciating agony of her skin, but carrying Duke's reviled legacy in the bargain. It's absurd to think he spends so much of his life cursing his curse, only to now need it back.

Even if it weren't for his investigation, he's not prepared to make this trade. At least Nathan's Trouble doesn't harm anybody but himself, and he counts himself one of the lucky ones for it.

Unfortunately, Haven is a worse mess than he is, and who knows what's happening to Jordan, to Dwight, or anyone out there right now? He can't help but think he's going to have to listen to those whispers, sooner or later.

He settles for coaxing John from behind the bar, while Audrey and Duke continue... what they're doing... Occasionally something rattles or scrapes against the Gull's windows or doors and sends an involuntary jolt through him. There are things out there, and his newly-awake nerves are rather highly strung. If out there is where they plan to go, John may be better off staying where he is.

Sensation is a distraction Nathan doesn't need. As he's leaning down to speak to John, the wooden counter under his palm is smooth and cool, hard with rounded edges, and that alone is almost more than he can bear. Inside, he can feel the whisper of blood through his veins, the faint tremor of his pounding heart, and those tiny remnant aches of all the places he's abused his body unknowing. The grounding solidity of actually feeling the weight of his feet on the floor helps, and the very familiar ache of his oft-broken toes somewhat focuses him. He's had that pain most of his life, that being what happens when you spend a year at age eight unable to feel a damn thing. He tries not to touch his face; he tries not to touch anything; can't afford the distraction, and what's more, doesn't want this to knock him down when he has to give it up, the way it did last time.

Which he dealt with by letting Duke fuck him, after all, so if that doesn't illustrate how much it messed with him...

"Yow!" All right, that's just getting distracting. Duke has his shorts halfway down his ass while Audrey cleans and dresses the gouge left by the glass. It's not what Nathan wants to see, and he could do without the soundtrack as well, as Duke experiences the effects of Audrey's touch. "That -- that's incredible," Duke's words stumble in his awed excitement. "From nothing, from a total blank, it's -- you can't imagine. There are no competing signals... everything sharpens on that point. You've no idea what that feels like."

Now Duke is divulging all his secrets, casting over at Nathan suspiciously, like he's been holding out. Nathan frowns. As if he was ever going to say all that? Duke's the mouthy one. Besides, what did they think it felt like, when he can't feel anything but her?

"Touch me again," insists Duke, earning Audrey's snort. "All right, hey, I didn't say 'touch my ass', did I? Here, do my hand." He scuffles back into his shorts, still on the floor, and raises his left hand for her touch. She turns it into a helping hand up to his feet. Nathan, while they're... playing... drags John up as well, and gives in and pats him on the shoulder, as much for his own distraction as a comforting gesture. Duke... doesn't stop. "Whew! This is after five minutes. Nathan, this is secret porn, you dog."

"Only to you," he says brusquely. Audrey's looking at him with arch amusement.

"No. No," Duke insists, his face taking on an aggressive, oblivious focus, and Nathan gets it, he does. Duke's all caught up in the drug that's Audrey Parker. That doesn't stop Nathan wanting to plant his fist in the bastard's face. What stops him is that Duke won't feel it and it won't help, what with all the other things they should be focusing on. "No. I refuse to believe that you don't notice this. Audrey, touch me again." He spreads his arms, presenting himself, and waits. Nathan wonders where she'll go for. His bared chest where the ends of his shirt flap open and that damn whistle hangs? His face, gently caressing? Maybe she'll just take his hand again. Nathan wants to stop watching, because he can't really handle seeing this.

She shakes her head instead. "No." It's not a nasty rejection, but it is absolute.

Duke's mouth hangs wide in stunned shock. "Wait, what? One little touch? We're buddies!"

Her face between reproach and apology, she says, "Nathan never asks me to touch him, and you're going to be back to normal as soon as we fix this. Behave, Duke."

"Never?" Duke spins and accuses. "What's wrong with you?"

"You ever think you should turn that question around?" Nathan asks, still pissed off, yet very smug -- relieved; God, yes -- that Audrey had the sense to shut that exchange down. No, he's never asked her. Why the hell has he never asked her? It just worked for Duke a couple of times in a row. Yet he can't escape the feeling that coming from him it would be just... pathetic. From Duke it's roguish, loutish and, well, Duke-ish.

"It's in the interests of scientific enquiry," Duke tries. "All right, so you touch me." He holds out his hand to Nathan.

"You know there's no point in that."

"Maybe I want to not-feel you. Come on! Nathan!"

Fuck you, he thinks, sour at being laid bare by Duke, since it's his Trouble Duke's made into that damn science project. Yet Nathan has done a whole bunch of highly intimate things with Duke while he couldn't feel and it strikes him as absurd and kind of sad not to at least touch Duke's hand while he has the chance. Forcing himself to keep it brief, faking indifference, he swats out with his open palm. Duke grabs him by wrist and elbow and hangs on.

Warm skin. Taut muscle. The strong pulse of blood. All the lines and ridges of those clever hands... It's like he can feel every one of them. Nathan shudders. Even though it's not that direct, needle-point precision of being the only spot in the darkness, the touch is as intense as Audrey's. He knows why. He's touched enough other things in the past quarter-hour to know this, this flavour of intensity, is particular to Duke. He still isn't thrilled that Duke can do that to him.

"Shit. That sucks," Duke declares, staring at their hands, flexing his fingers as though to encourage sensation.

"I know." Nathan finally pulls himself together enough to wrench his hand free.

Just when he thinks he's escaped, Duke says, "But you felt that."

He can't deny it.

"...Did you enjoy that, Nate?" Maybe Duke can see the spaceyness still in his eyes; that he hasn't yet quite descended back to Earth. "Because that would be pretty sick, wouldn't it? Feeling that sort of feeling for someone you're so convinced is a monster and a murderer?"

They're saved from a punch-out by John, coming between them with a new interjection of utter charm. "Jesus H. Christ. First the freaks, now what the hell is all this fag shit?"

***

"People in Haven have special... powers. We call them 'Troubles'." Audrey's trying to explain things to John. This is awkward. Even more awkward, Duke thinks, is almost losing it in the midst of crisis -- almost setting Nathan off, too, damn it -- because of what? Too much shit in a row, and he just reached shit-saturation-point when he realised that Nathan reacted to his touch, and the thought that filled his mind for that moment was wow: right now, he might not be able to feel, but he can make Nathan feel. Then, he remembered how Nathan feels -- thinks -- about him, right now, which means none of that is in the cards.

He can't believe Nathan never got down on his knees and fucking begged Audrey to touch him. Anywhere, everywhere. Duke already thought that relationship was weird, and that was before he knew what it was like. It's nothing to do with Nathan's damn Trouble, he decides -- Nathan fucking Wuornos really is made of stone. How can a man deny himself so acutely and stay remotely sane? Then again, he has his doubts about the 'sane' part sometimes.

"We need to leave here and get to Mrs Scacchi," Audrey states again. Rather forcefully, as Audrey Parker goes, but she's been doing that more lately, and Duke gets the feeling she's approaching shit-saturation-point, too, and may actually do something like bash their heads together if he and Nathan can't co-operate for five minutes. "We'll need to make a run for Nathan's truck. I'm hoping we can get at least most of the way there on the roads."

Duke could challenge why it's always Nathan's relic of a Bronco that's the designated Scooby Van, but really, so long as it takes the hits, his own truck doesn't have to. Fine with him.

"Right." Nathan juggles keys from his pocket clumsily, as if being able to feel them just confuses the issue, and draws his gun in the other hand. Then he stands there and looks like both handfuls of hard angles and cold metal are somehow miraculous.

Not about to be outdone on preparedness, Duke goes behind the bar and grabs the shotgun he keeps there. He misjudges his grip, but manages to hide and correct the fumble. Nathan does this, somehow, all day every day, so he's not going to let on that it's giving him problems. He can't feel how tightly he's holding the gun and he'll have to be really careful around that trigger.

...Fuck this, he can do this. They give Nathan a gun and badge and let him loose on the all-unsuspecting population of Haven, after all. Nathan, who drops things, trips, walks into things and gets injured more than anyone he's ever known. Now he knows why. But Nathan's never misfired his service weapon. This is all about concentration. He loads the gun. Perfectly. Pockets extra ammo.

"We're going to have to be careful what we shoot," Audrey warns, taking all the fun out of it. "The things out there are just people, or started off that way. Try to scare them off first if you can."

Nathan points out, "We may be the only ones with a chance to reverse this. Save more people in the long run. Shoot if you have to."

His dad would've been mighty proud of that. Duke wonders when Nate got so harshly pragmatic. And if that's true, how is it Nathan won't condone their actions over the fate of the organ-stealing asshole? No, Duke knows; it's because Nathan doesn't want to release the monster in him, and somehow thinks that's worse than all those dead kids.

For the first time it occurs to Duke that from a certain point of view that's almost poignant. After all, he knows Nathan lets the personal get in the way of the wider picture.

Audrey doesn't seem thrilled by the pronouncement, but bites her tongue. He probably is right, and Duke for one isn't going to be wasting time trying to line up a leg shot if something the size of a man with teeth like those flowers is coming at him.

"Stay close behind me," she tells John, whose pants are falling down as he tries to walk. He tightens his belt, and casts a dismayed face toward the unconscious thing that was Nadine. "What about her? Don't we need her to turn me back?"

"Turn us back," Nathan corrects. He wavers dubiously. "You think they'd hurt her?"

Audrey draws a little gun from her ankle holster with a grimace and puts it in John's hand. "Stay here. Bar the doors. Guard her."

"Jesus H!" John doesn't want to stay there, and Duke can not blame him, but John also nods, swallowing. Yes, John wants his dick back. There's a lot a man will do with motivation like that. "Right. Bar the doors."

"You might also want to find something to tie her up with," Audrey suggests, and John looks even less pleased, possibly realising that means he'll have to touch Nadine, and strangely, John is not too keen to do that anymore.

Audrey and Nathan flank Duke, ready and armed, as he opens the door. He tries not to fumble with the lock, harder still to work under such scrutiny.

He thinks, golf, crafts, driving that bastard car, shooting a gun, goddamn writing; all the things he's seen Nathan do routinely. When he's manipulating the lock with his hands, he either has to watch and control every movement with fine precision like his fingers are tweezers or some other unfeeling extension, or just bludgeon it out and push until it's obvious his fingers can't go further due to obstruction. He's seen Nathan reach behind him and draw his gun, blind, a hundred times. What is that? Muscle memory? How long did he have to practice before he could do it every time?

There's a scritch-scritch-scritch on the other side of the door even as he pushes it back.

Duke kicks out at the man-thing waiting. Somewhere in there is a regular, but their jaw hangs open full of snakes, and pinkish ooze runs from their eyes. He averts his gaze as soon as they're on the ground. Makes his new favourite mantra, don't look don't look don't look.

Duke hears the door relocked and bolted behind him as they charge for Nathan's Bronco, and shit... You'd think a dear friend had died from the expression on Nate's face when he sees it. The car, on close inspection, is sagging and rusted, its tyres melted like oil. "This is going to revert, isn't it?" Nathan asserts, desperately, demanding words of comfort. Audrey gives him a what-the-fuck? stare.

"With the rest, buddy," Duke says. Hell, Nathan's had that car twenty years. Duke's own truck doesn't look in much better shape. "Mrs Scacchi sure hates cars," he mutters, then states, louder, "Looks like we're on foot."

"Then we're on foot." Audrey starts running. She puts a shot into the ground where a bunch of things that had earlier been folks enjoying sun and beers on the decking are taking interest. Maybe it makes them think twice. Much of the ground is like scorched earth. The grass, where there still is grass, oozes like it's bleeding, and holy crap, that nightmare over there used to be a small tree. Now it thrashes carnivorous branches around a captive... dog, Duke thinks, and hopes, and tells himself. Audrey, leading, veers off the road in a direct line for town.

"Parker!" Nathan shouts, exuding exasperation, hesitating and then following anyway.

For once, Duke is on the same page. "If we stick to the road, we can at least avoid the plants."

"But not the people," she responds; and everything becomes clear. "I don't intend to have to come back to find out who I was forced to kill. This... is the shortest way back to Mrs Scacchi's, right?" She looks to Nathan, choosing now to doubt her local knowledge.

"As the crow flies..." he starts, dubiously.

"What nonverbal means to say is there's a strip of parkland between here and there. We've just seen what Mrs Scacchi does to trees."

A swath of dark flowers approaches them now. Their teeth clack-clack in anticipation. The fabric of Nathan's jeans turns them easily aside, and Audrey in suit pants is okay, particularly when Nathan holsters his gun and picks her up, carrying her across despite her yelp of protest. Duke kicks at the flowers desperately, then wades in, kicking out, then lunging further. He can't feel anything and can't see much. When he arrives at the other side, his bare legs are scratched bloody.

He glares at Nathan. "Would've been nice to have the offer of a lift." Audrey looks pissed, but hey, he's not proud.

"Watch your hand," Nathan advises tersely back, and Duke discovers something's caught him a good chomp on his right hand, too.

"Fine." He understands that the last thing Nathan wants is Duke's blood anywhere near him, right now.

***

It appalls Nathan that someone could do this to his town. Even the sun appears distorted and sickly above them. That's got to be a product of the haze in the air, purple-grey, drifting, that smells of decay and... abomination. All of this is an abomination. His heart pounds thickly, his blood feels sluggish in his veins, his head aches. He's seen Troubles, but never anything like this. His functioning nerves, raw and new, seem to exist again just to lay him bare to it. By contrast, Duke gets to be pissy and largely unaffected.

It's hard to think.

Audrey's idea to avoid people is probably for the best. After the Gull, out on its lonely promontory, there's a ridge of scrub and trees followed by residential streets cutting back in towards town. They're lucky in one sense: Mrs Scacchi could live a lot further away.

On a good day, it should take less than half an hour. A good day, this is not.

Mrs Scacchi's hellish Trouble doesn't seem to have reshaped the landscape, the essential form of the world, even if it's twisted most of the things in it. A pool of water bleeds and bubbles, and seems to be straining towards him, shivering ripples moving like it's alive. Nathan avoids stepping in it. Everything teems with the obnoxious life of decay. What doesn't crumble to dust at his footfall parts like rotting flesh to reveal the festering mess within, or else turns around and tries to sink unlikely teeth into him. Duke's acquisition of his numbness hasn't automatically reset his sense of smell back to normal levels, and he also can hear it all, maybe too faint for the others: chittering, soggy sliding and rustling. Under that there's another sound, a rushing, high pitched hiss that for all he knows could be the world crying out in pain.

"How could anyone do all this?" Audrey whispers, sounding heartbroken. She looks like every step is almost unbearable, too. It's her job to fix Haven just as it is his. He thinks they're both taking this personally.

"Arlene says she doesn't mean it." Even for him, it's hard not to wonder what twisted, evil thing is inside Mrs Scacchi's soul, that she could cause this.

Duke, trudging at his back, says, "Does the sky look more normal over where it meets the horizon?" He sounds faintly desperate. His footsteps are awkward as he adjusts to the fine art of planting his feet securely when he can't feel them. "This has got to have an end, right? It's just Haven, and not everything? No way this Trouble is big enough to mangle the whole world."

"You're already planning your way out of this if we fail?" Nathan demands, which isn't fair and he knows it, because Duke's with them, heading for a line of trees that looks like doom and not running in the opposite direction. Whatever else he can accuse Duke of, that long list does not include 'coward'.

"No, because all else aside, I would like back the feeling in my dick," Duke retorts. "Not everyone is cut out to be some kind of neutered Action-Man figure like you."

"Boys," Audrey warns. She sounds actually shocked.

Nathan doesn't mind, not really. He knows he asked for that one, deserves it, and he can gladly go at Duke all day rather than think about what they're walking through. Besides, Duke's also wrong, and ironically in a better position than most to know it. Maybe Audrey catches some quality of that in the sneer that passes between them, because she stops looking so annoyed and rolls her eyes.

Duke ruins it this time. He says, abruptly, "Guys. You don't think Arlene could inherit this?"

Nathan feels his face go tight. Being able to feel his own facial expressions makes him self-conscious, as if he's telegraphing every thought. He doesn't like it. "Arlene's not Troubled." He bites his tongue on the urge to reiterate, Stay away from her. "From the look of her, if she was, it would have triggered long before now."

"No, but we've seen it before," Audrey says slowly. "When a parent dies, remember? Chris Brody..." Chris Brody is on the short list of people Nathan diligently tries not to think about at all. "Arlene said that Mrs Scacchi got it when her mother died."

"Shit. Even if Arlene's outlook is better than this, she's hardly going to be all rainbows and moonbeams about the world when her mother's just died," Duke says harshly. "That's -- it's fucking cruel, is what it is. Inheritance practically perpetuates it -- the fucking trigger--"

"We don't know," Nathan snaps, hating this. Three of them dancing around the subject and not saying it, but he already decided he's not going to be the one to say it. "It's all speculation." He wants to argue, Arlene wouldn't do that. She's got that crazy control. But inside, he's pretty sure she has the capacity.

"I think Arlene knows," Audrey says. "She was afraid. You saw it, too."

"Of this, surely."

"I don't..." She looks off into the distance. Beyond the lurking, twisted trees and undergrowth, the neat, small houses of the neighbourhood they were in earlier stand in lines like teeth. "Oh, you have got to be kidding me."

Nathan squints. There's a trace of fog, or at least that unnatural haze, thicker ahead, and they're still a long way off, but it does look like there's something darker rising out of the regimented streets, a shape that definitely doesn't belong. Tall, thin, jagged...

"Looks like the Dark Lord Sauron made his holiday residence here in Haven, Mordor. And he couldn't ask for a better spot for it."

Nathan appreciates Duke's bitter humour even less than usual.

Audrey asks, "Are we talking the princess in the tower or the Evil Queen?" Then she decides for herself while both men are still mulling over the answer, "Well, she needs to be rescued, either way."

Nathan watches Duke's face closely. It's useless to work up suspicions of his intentions because at the moment, the power isn't in Duke's hands. Nathan has to wonder, though, because he doesn't know if Duke was ever in love with Arlene and if maybe somewhere, deep down, any part of him still is.

Nathan wonders how he would feel about that, if it were true.

***

Duke wishes, more than anything else, that he hadn't worn his shorts this morning. Each new patch of grass he steps through gets excited by the nearness of his blood, then swells and turns rust-coloured after gorging on it. Nathan's Trouble is useful for some things, else he'd be a stinging mass from all the little slices. As it is, the wounds are superficial and he doesn't feel them, so he attempts not to care. There are other things to think about.

Like Arlene. If her mother was ready to go at any moment, this could already be Arlene, and if it is they're screwed. Or at least have to hope like hell that Audrey's weird, near-empathic knack with the Troubled can somehow talk her down from this. But this seems, in every way, a step too far. So Duke hopes the old lady's still hanging on. At least then there's a solution, whether a little time or something more radical, even though he doesn't like himself very much for thinking it. If it turns out they have to use his father's curse, he's not sure how he feels about it being out of his hands. He should be relieved, but Nathan... hell.

It's not funny or ironic any more.

He knows for a fact that he could never kill Arlene. He's damn sure Nathan will feel the same. They were friends, if not in school, then out of it. Garland Wuornos and Lacey Scacchi were as pally as Mrs Scacchi ever got with anyone, and Arlene had often mentioned getting saddled with Nate's company when one of their terrifying single parents needed the other to babysit.

Duke tries to shift his focus to the threats in front of him instead of a potential endgame that doesn't bear contemplation. They are nearly at the tree line, and this is not going to be fun. On the other hand, the trees have shaded out most of the undergrowth, so maybe his legs will get a rest.

The trees poke and pull at them, branches insinuating through clothes and taking a chokehold, and Audrey's right. It is like trudging through some fanged forest to rescue a princess in a tower. Except, okay, this princess is something of a dragon, and might prefer that description.

"Damn it, Nathan," Duke explodes, as he fights off choking branches for the fifth time. "Your Trouble sucks." He can't feel the branches starting to take hold and move out of reach or yank them off him before they're a serious impediment.

He actually doesn't need to explain any further. Nathan gets it, adapted after years of this shit. "You take the lead," he offers, and from there Duke can concentrate on the front of them he can see, while Nate watches his back.

Audrey brings up the rear, since her senses are functioning as-accustomed. "Try not to be spooked into shooting at trees," she says. "I think it's a thin chance it's doing any good, so it's probably just wasting ammunition."

"I can't believe these were even trees," Duke mutters. "Old lady Scacchi is messed up."

Some of the trees have broad, sandpapery tendrils that abrade skin where they make contact. Others have branches oozing a caustic white slime. The spruce are worst, their foliage like whips lined with needles, and holy crap. Just because Duke can't feel his body doesn't stop the mounting horror over what's happening to it. He'd really like to still want to trade Nathan's affliction back to him, later.

For the first time, too, it's occurring to him that Nathan is -- and he doesn't want to use the word, but if it were a sensory lack like blindness or deafness, it'd be obvious, and surely skin is as important a sense organ as eyes or ears. He's missing huge chunks of necessary information about the world, and if that's not a disability...

Fending off a particularly vindictive spruce, Duke staggers against one of the other trees, the ones that look dead, blackened and charred as if burned out. Its bark crumbles at the pressure and his hand almost sinks through the trunk.

"Duke!" Audrey catches him. Her small hands wrap in his collar and belt, her feet set determinedly to take his greater weight, and she pulls him out. His hand, freed, has a mass of insects crawling across the skin. Not being able to feel them doesn't stop him yelling his head off as he frantically tries to shake them clear. Nathan slaps at them with his bare hands, until the problem of Duke's blood occurs to him, and he pulls a face and shrugs out of his jacket to use that instead.

"Fuck! Fuck!" Duke tries to modify his breathing, rein in his fast panic. "If I get killed by a tree, so help me..."

Nathan snorts and says, "We'll protect you."

Nathan is a freak in general, and Duke hasn't missed noticing that he's extending his touchy tendencies while un-afflicted to a whole heap of things Duke wouldn't want to touch anytime. It doesn't ease the shock of turning around to find Nathan with his hand on one of the ghostly white skeletons of trees that probably used to be some definition of pine. "Jesus, Nate!"

Nathan whips his hand back. "Feels like bone," he says, with a defensive edge. "Calcified. Hard." He looks amazed. "I remember what bone feels like."

"Please don't touch them," Audrey begs.

Five minutes later, Nathan raps out, "Duke!" and Duke turns to see him charge off into the heart of a thrashing tree-monster. Duke realises one of the clingy, abrading trees has got its tendrils around Audrey and picked her off the rear of the party before either man could react. For once, Duke has no hesitation in following the patented Wuornos Suicide Lunge. They pull Audrey out, losing more of the exposed skin they have left in the process.

Nathan twitchily guards the back of the group for the last twenty or thirty yards.

It should be a relief to be away from the aggressive woods and the more vicious of the plantlife, but it's not. Ahead, shapes move around between the houses. Screams and cries float over that don't sound like they could be produced by anything human except, worse, for the odd few that do.

Nathan draws his gun. What should be a subdued click sounds as loud as any of the howls or screaming. Audrey is more hesitant following suit, but she does follow. Duke can see Nathan's line of reason, after over an hour of this landscape. They need to end this. Anything that twists a human being to something like that--

That has just climbed spider-like over the fence of a garden backing onto the slope that's their current perch. He'd doubt it had ever been human if not for the pink face freakishly blinking out from amid all the legs. The thing moves faster than he's ever seen anything move, right at him. Duke just about manages to intercept the lunge by getting his foot up, and its own momentum supplies force to the kick, because he sure doesn't have time to inject any. He runs after it downhill and kicks and stamps, trying to not look at it, then dashes back to unashamedly hide behind the two cops.

Nathan, sour as hell, looks at the thing. "Wonder who that was?"

Duke's not even going to think about that part. He's just overwhelmed by relief, beneath the mind-numbing terror, that they didn't have to shoot it. "Whoever they are. Alive," he wheezes. "How about we move before they get up and force us to change that."

They cut over the low fence it came from, through a garden, and into an eerily quiet street. The houses either stand open or very firmly closed up. Duke reminds himself that it's the middle of the day: people have work, errands, school... The centre of town, which they've avoided, is going to be unimaginable; being in any institution full of people when all this went down would be nothing like good.

At one window of a closed house, a deformed face presses dead grey skin and bulging eyes, hands trailing slime on the glass. These aren't any more the people they were, but Duke supposes there's no guarantee that makes them brave or aggressive monsters. Spying them looking, it ducks out of sight.

The most disturbing part is that it was wearing a floral house-coat. There is no end to the horror.

"This way," Nathan says, striding ahead. They can cut through the streets and be at Mrs Scacchi's in a few minutes, in theory.

Duke hopes all the demons Mrs Scacchi made of her neighbours are as chicken as the one behind the window. Though he can do without the house-coats. In this neighbourhood, and with his track record, he suspects he's dead out of luck.

"I ever tell you about the day everyone in town disappeared?" Audrey asks, her steps slowing, the line of her shoulders tense. "That was creepy. This -- isn't that." Her voice sinks low, urgent. "We're being stalked."

It's anyone's guess whether that knowledge comes from the memory of an FBI agent or something older, deeper, unfathomable. Duke's not going to argue with it. Nathan, stone faced, swings around this way and that, right arm straight, left balancing it, trying to find something definitive to aim at. After a few seconds, the three of them settle into picking a direction each and guarding it, arranged in a rough triangle.

The creatures come; one slithering on the ground, ugly body warping and shape and pattern shifting as it comes. Duke doesn't see the others as clearly, but one of them sort of leaps or half-flies from a nearby roof. The last just runs at them. Nathan's gun goes off, dropping it from its feet.

It keeps crawling, trailing too much black blood, until it stops and slumps. There's another behind it, and another behind that. "Oh, God--" Nathan's voice is thick with horror and he's still frozen in shock from the first, the blameless person trapped in there who he just blew away. He doesn't fire again before the oncoming two bear him to the ground.

Mindful of that lesson, Duke scoots up a six foot fence to get out of reach of the slithering, crawling thing. He crouches down and tries to knock it out with swipes of the long shotgun. It's hard to retain his precarious perch or fine-tune his balance without being able to feel his legs gripping the fence.

He can hear Audrey's voice, trying to be soothing but a little too fast, too sharp. She somehow ducked the first lunge of the flying thing and grounded it with a grab and twist of her FBI kung-fu, but now she backs away, gun trained, trying to talk. Her eyes keep flicking behind it, to Nathan and not him, and Duke would take offence if Nathan wasn't the one in more of a fix anyway, and if it wasn't for--

Duke's throat closes up convulsively.

There are more of them coming.

***

Nathan hoped that if he put one down hard, first, the rest would stop. He's been sensing since Audrey pointed it out that there are eyes on them from every angle.

Unfortunately, his plan had the opposite effect. It's like they sense his hesitation, and worse, Audrey and Duke have caught the funk from him. She can't talk her way out of this and Duke isn't going to get anywhere bludgeoning around with a shotgun. Nathan knows he needs to work up to pulling that trigger again before the things Mrs Scacchi made of her neighbours dismantle him. But all he can think about is how he likely just killed someone who used to be a man and, once this is solved, would've been again.

At least, he thinks from habit, he won't feel it. But when the first claws tear across his back, he does feel. Raw, real pain after years of numbness scatters his senses. By the time he can think again, he's on the ground, his service weapon who-knows-where, his face full of grit road. A weight on his back resists his efforts to roll to throw it off. One of his flailing arms is grabbed and hauled on like the grabber wants to part it from its socket.

Nathan screams and gets a lungful of the stench. It's worse than the pain. Choking, he twists enough to catch a glimpse of what's on his back and wishes he hadn't. He's appalled by the idea of it touching him through two layers of clothing, never mind breaking skin -- a heap of shrivelled flesh and weeping, pussy sores. Its eyes are black pits oozing grey trails at the lower lids. He spies something glittering dangling from its throat and recognises a cross, tiny, pretty and silver. That's followed by his recognition of the clothes Sharyn Dickens was wearing, for there's surely nothing else of the woman left to recognise.

He manages to twist enough to hook his hand under the necklace chain and wrenches his arm around. The chain bites into his skin, then snaps, but enough of her weight is jerked clear of him that when he bucks again she's sent sprawling. He gets a knee under him and half rises. The thing gnawing on his arm is almost a relief to look upon after that, but he discovers its comparative good looks won't help him fight it. Slamming his fist into its face doesn't even move it. It's stronger than Sharyn.

Sharyn's getting up.

"Nathan!" Duke shouts urgently. Amid kissing the tarmac, he's not had much attention to spare for how Duke and Audrey are faring. Duke's come down from dancing on the fence and is trying to wade towards him, probably knowing just as little as Nathan does what damage the grey lump fixed around his leg might be doing aside from slowing him almost to a halt. That's not the source of Duke's concern. Nathan follows the desperate focus on Duke's face. Audrey...

It's like they know instinctively that she can help them if they get close enough. The twisted things that were people cluster around her, tearing at her clothes, trying to reach her skin, winding hands in her hair. They, too, need to touch. Small changes start to take effect, the horror abating by fractions. But they're pawing at her, hurting her as they fight each other to get closer. Half a dozen, still more coming.

Seeing her in trouble gives Nathan a further surge of strength, but it's not enough to shake two opponents. Duke uses his teeth to tear off the dressing Audrey put on his hand, then to tear into the wound underneath. He flicks his hand, hard. "Help her."

A drop of blood lands on Nathan's bare, tattooed arm. An instant later, it rides over him like a freight train, thundering and unstoppable. He smashes both the transformed ghouls away from him and lunges headlong for the ones pinning Audrey. He plucks two of them off, and--

Human strength fails him as he pulls at a third, which spins and cracks out a huge blow with its fused, lumpy hammers of hands. He gets his arms up to block it, the right taking the brunt, which wakes again the pain of that old broken rib near his shoulder. Even then the force of the blow sends him backwards, and when he hits the ground he skids a further few feet.

Pain is an unaccustomed distraction.

Duke looms over him, face more serious than Nathan's ever seen before. Duke reaches down and offers a hand -- but no, it's not an offer. Conflicting thoughts careen through Nathans' mind and he flinches first from the bloody hand and then again as he thinks of Audrey, of Haven. But it's not an offer, and Duke doesn't wait for a choice; grabs Nathan's chin when his hands prove elusive, smearing blood across his face.

Duke says, "sorry", as if that means anything when he's already urging Nathan up and back towards the enemy as the effect takes hold.

More blood, this time. More intense. Nathan disappears beneath it, only dimly aware of getting Audrey's assailants clear of her and then systematically putting them down so hard they won't get up again soon. All he knows is adrenaline, power, and the sheer damage he can dish out with the blunt weapon of his body.

It's only later he'll find the myriad handprints on the back of his shirt, that soaked through to skin, and realise this, too, was something Duke did to him.

***

Duke knows what he's doing is worse than what Audrey did to him with Harry Nicks, but all else he can see is they're dead, and the rest of Haven with them. He's not prepared to let that happen.

Still, he watches with rising horror. It's too weird seeing Nathan under the influence of his curse, silver eyes blank of expression... Although that part's still Nathan all over, because shit, Duke's almost loved the guy, but he has a face like a wall. But silver eyes don't hold any expression except freakish, and while Nathan's always been a freak, at least he never looked like one. He doesn't even look at home in his brain.

Maybe Duke smeared too much of his blood on Nathan's shirt earlier in the fight, because it isn't stopping. A frenzy has taken over. Duke's only ever experienced small doses of Troubled blood, and the effect doesn't last. That's what worried him enough that he painted Nathan's fucking shirt with it to start with. He's increasingly aware that was a mistake. This time, if Nathan calls it, he'll be right. He's definitely been screwed over by Duke Crocker.

That's even assuming Nathan comes down from this, because when Duke catches a glimpse of his eyes again, they're normal, yet nothing's changed in his behaviour. The strength has damped down a bit, but he's still riding on adrenaline and frenzy and doesn't seem to be having any problem flinging monster-ites around and beating them bloody. In case Nathan's not cogniscient enough to recognise him or, just possibly, in case he is, Duke takes a very wide route around to pick up Audrey. Blood cakes or oozes from just about all his exposed skin, so the last thing he needs to do right now is get near to Nathan again. Audrey can.

She's staring on, horrified. "Duke, what have you done?"

"I didn't--" The protest dies in his throat. All else aside, he's the only other blood-covered Troubled person here, Exhibit A. Most of the injuries are no more than scratches. He assumes they're no more than scratches. He'd know if he had a gaping hole in his back or something, right? "Audrey, you've got to help him."

"That is what I do," she allows, her voice shaking. She's unsteady as she pulls to her feet, but lets go of his offered hand quickly, her touch like fire through the patina of blood. She supports herself more cautiously with an arm around his waist. He feels the shifting of his balance in compensation for her weight, sort of, and faintly, maybe the smallest trace of her body heat through his clothes.

Audrey forges through the littered bodies at a slow limp, her steps getting surer as she recovers. She pulls herself clear of Duke, ever driven to help the Troubled, and none more than this one.

"Nathan!" He watches Audrey totter into the midst of the battle, grasping at Nathan and trying to cling onto him even while his fists are still pounding, desperately yelling in his ear. "Nathan! We're not killing them, remember! We're not killing! Stop!"

It's obvious Nathan doesn't want to stop, and Audrey throws herself against his chest with another desperate shout of his name. Duke sees Nathan's eyes fix on her, dopey at first, then with gathering awareness and horror. He stares at his own bloodstained hands against the pure brilliance of her hair.

Somehow, in the next instant Nathan has gone from incoherent blood-fueled violence to clutching Audrey's smaller form against him like a lifeline. He holds his hands out behind her body, clamping her close with arms and elbows, like he can't bring himself to besmirch her with the blood on his hands. Well, blood and black ooze, and whatever else, so he may have a point.

Duke thinks about the blood on Nathan's hands. There's nothing to say none of those people were Troubled themselves to start with. Maybe that means it's not all down to him.

"What," Nathan says, groggily, "what the hell happened?"

He sounds like he knows what happened. Not all the way, or he'd be coming at Duke with unbridled rage, but enough.

"Duke's Trouble." Audrey catches his face as he turns his head. "Don't look at them. None of them are dead." Except, probably, that first one, and for that Nathan wasn't under the influence of anything. "We need to keep going."

Audrey's voice is hard, and it occurs to Duke that maybe she's behind him, after all. She did the same -- similar -- to him. Nathan is more selective about the path of necessity, mostly depending on who's suggesting it, so it's doubtful any forgiveness will be forthcoming from that direction.

Later, he tells himself. Somehow, they all have to survive this, first.

Nate surreptitiously manages to wipe the worst of the blood off on his jeans, and he and Audrey lean on each other. That touch -- does Audrey feel different to him, now she's nothing special, no more present than the rest of the world under his touch? Duke stands apart from them grimly, separated by internal miles. His feet are numb on the ground, and he suspects that at this moment they might've been numb even without Nathan's Trouble. But Nathan's Trouble surely doesn't help to surmount the distance he feels.

He can't touch them. He can't touch anyone.

Least of all Nathan.

***

Nathan tries to put the loss of control and loss of self from his mind. He'll figure out how and where to file it in his growing concerns about Crocker later. This isn't his problem, he tells himself fiercely. Right now, anyway, it's more important they restore Haven.

He finds his gun, ignoring Audrey's attempt to divert him from too close proximity to one of his victims as he bends to retrieve it -- that, too, he'll deal with later. It's already committed to memory indelibly, despite her efforts. "Come on--" He forges ahead, shrugging off help. They need to move faster than this.

It's actually easy to focus on other things: Mrs Scacchi's dark tower rises out of the small cluster of houses that make up the next street, and now they're closer, it's possible to see the jumbled hodgepodge of all the pieces of her home built into the structure sideways, upside-down, wrong-way-round. The tower stem looks at first glance like it's made out of those flowers from the front doorstep, grown to immense proportions, but it's just that their vines are so densely woven around it, thick and dark, knotted and braided. Snapping flower heads loom out of the twisted morass, swollen and huge like guardian dragons. He hopes like hell the tower won't have to be climbed beanstalk-style.

If it does, he hopes they physically can. He's a collection of aches and strained muscles from throwing all those transformed monsters around. Audrey has bruises the shape of handprints already forming. He's been keeping a watch on Duke, mostly from habit, his Trouble being what it is and his Trouble being over there, and while he thinks the damage is essentially superficial, the tally is still mounting.

He's not used to pain, and he's not used to this... this something still singing in his system. Adrenaline, maybe: it's been long enough he might forget what that feels like, but he doesn't think so. At least he seems to have cleared the streets of the transformed population, and they need to make the most of that, before the ones here start to recover, or the ones watching who've learned caution realise their prey are all beat to hell and come back.

The tower gets no less jarring and anachronistic as they close in. It's the oddest thing Nathan's ever seen and, well, consider the competition. They fight their way past a few transformed stragglers to the tower's vine-choked base and find it growing from the gutted hole of where the Scacchi house and garden used to be. The drawers of Mrs Scacchi's kitchen units lead up like steps to the perched chair of her stairlift, maybe twelve feet off the ground. Above the chair, the spiralling rail ascends to the top.

"Fuck me," says Duke, slapping himself hard on the forehead, then sliding his hand down to peek over it. For some reason, amid all the strain, the stress, the acrimony, it's surreally funny. Audrey starts giggling uncontrollably and even Nathan feels his face crack a smile. Though some of that's from Audrey, who turns and burrows into his ragged shirt to muffle her mirth. It... tickles. How long since he's felt that?

Duke ventures forward, steps up and balances on a kitchen drawer. "Careful," he warns, wobbling, his feet spanning the front and back. "There are spikes inside the drawers."

Nathan leans over to look as Duke hops onward and upward. Not spikes, but standing upright in the depths at the base of the drawers, which really shouldn't be that deep... kitchen knifes? Also table knives, forks, a cheese skewer, and even grapefruit spoons.

"This is insane," he chokes.

"What's up, Nate?" Duke prods. "Kitchen cabinets and cutlery not heroic enough for you?"

He only grunts in reply. They still must climb to the top and breach this fortress of absurdity to find Arlene; challenge, somehow, Mrs Scacchi's ability to warp reality.

Audrey hops onto the drawer staircase, picking her way after Duke to the platform made from paving slabs and garden trellis. The stairlift seems rooted in like one of the vines. Nathan follows, slower, less certain of his footing as he fights the aches of the recent beating -- and even if most of the beating was done by him, they still sure do ache. He does not particularly want to meet his end due to threatening tableware. On the platform, nasty, too-large spiders try to drop on them from the twisted stalks, and fanged butterflies from the fleshy flowers try to sink their teeth in.

"We need to use that thing?" he asks, eying the stairlift with great trepidation. The mechanism looks intact, but he hardly wants to trust it. Maybe they can climb up the rail, instead.

Audrey steps back, tipping her head and shading her eyes against the unnatural sunlight. "It's a long way to climb, and we're going to have to fend off those flower heads while we do it."

Craziness aside, what he most dislikes is the idea that thing forces them to split up. Audrey reads his mind. "Two could probably fit on it."

Nathan scowls at Duke, then looks back to Audrey. Usually, this wouldn't be a tough decision, if hell of an argument, but after recent experience, he has to question who Audrey is in more danger from. "One of us holds you, steadies you to shoot at the," a distasteful pause stemming from the fact he's not going to give word to the concept of man eating flowers, "things."

"You," Duke says, pointedly, startling him, then looking surprised by his surprise. "What? You're both lighter than I am. I'll provide... cover, from the ground, and follow after."

Nathan supposes that makes sense. Though it belatedly occurs to him just how close he'll need to get to Audrey for the duration of the ascent. It's not like Duke to surrender such an opportunity. "...Right." Somewhat sourly, he adds, "Watch where you're shooting with that thing."

"Guys." Audrey, impatience showing again. She always used to admonish them with more grace, and generous humour. These days, the joke's wearing thin. She practically shoves Nathan at the chair and climbs after carefully, bracing her body around and on top of him. Today he doesn't need skin contact to feel her, compact, lithe and warm against him. He flexes his hands at her waist and wills them not to stray. For no other parts of his anatomy to show interest inappropriate to the situation, either.

Duke lopes back down the staircase of Mrs Scacchi's kitchen drawers with a lack of care that sneers at the complexities of his -- Nathan's -- Trouble, back to ground level where he can be much more mobile a sniper. He circles below, training the shotgun on the terrain above them as Audrey hits the chair's control button to go.

***

It's sad that Nathan can't take the opportunity to grope Audrey on a stairlift without dismay, but for once it's not hard to resist the urge to laugh. Duke keeps his gun trained upward, following the chair's progress as it curls around the tower. He blasts a flower head snaking in above them to mount an ambush on the bend, causing Audrey to duck and clutch Nathan harder. They're too far above him now, really, for such details, but he's pretty sure Nate's blushing furiously, and since he can feel at the moment, probably nursing some serious wood.

...So those two, Duke heard, were planning to get together before the kidnapping, before the damn meteor storm. How does that work again? Although Nathan managed to get through an evening of dirty, dirty things with him, so maybe he shouldn't mock.

He shoots another flower-head with a sudden spike of extra vehemence, then comes up empty almost nose-to-nose with one at ground level, rounding the tower. He makes what he's sure is a completely manly yell and skips backwards, but it's already straining at the limits of its stem and that extra step takes him out of its reach. It snaps its jaws, held harmlessly back.

"Too bad, buddy," Duke ticks it off with his finger, agitating it more, and saves his ammunition. He stumbles hurriedly sideways, trying to reload at the same time, realising he has to catch up with Nate and Audrey, who've completed their first circuit of the tower and are about halfway up. Another of the flower-heads crashes to the ground in front of him, snapped stem bleeding ichor, or whatever monster plants bleed. Scares the unholy crap out of him. "Watch where you're throwing those!"

Nathan shouts back. It's muffled by Audrey's chest, but probably derogatory. Duke shades his eyes and tries to peer up. He can just about tell that Nathan and Audrey are clutching each other considerably less delicately, clinging on for dear life. Duke takes careful, careful aim and shoots the flower head that's coming up. He wonders if the blur and occasional hitching of his vision is a stuck-with-Nathan's-Trouble version of light-headedness from blood loss. It doesn't help when he misjudges his footing on the rough ground and sprawls headlong, but at least it doesn't hurt. He manages not to pull the trigger. It's pretty easy to pick up his gun and himself: the same ease that always drives him mad trying to put any kind of a beat-down on Nathan.

He looks up and sees they've reached the top There's a kind of platform-porch at the bottom of the tower's top-heavy bulge where the majority of Mrs Scacchi's scrambled house is clustered. Nathan stands stiffly on guard while Audrey, kneeling, figures out how to send the chair back down.

...So help him, Duke does not want to do this. Yeah, he was blasé before, but he doesn't want to do alone what's just taken two of them plus ground support. On the plus side, there are less flower-heads because they already shot up a bunch. Very much on the negative side, Audrey and Nathan won't be able to provide him 360-degree cover from up there. They probably can't cover even half the tower below from their narrow perch.

But. Audrey. Nathan. Even Arlene. There's not much left in the world that he cares about. Most of it's up that crazy nightmare tower.

This was a dumb plan. They should've gotten a JCB and cut it down, made like Jack and the Beanstalk, but in the 21st century. Still, Arlene, Arlene, Arlene... he reminds himself. After all of this she'd better be up there. All this... surely Mrs Scacchi couldn't do this to her own daughter?

The chair descends back to its rest and Duke runs, teetering, back up the open kitchen drawers and hops in to perch untidily aboard. The button is easy to operate from the chair itself. Just slam his hand down... It doesn't rock as much with only his weight in it, but it's not right either. They've broken it. Mrs Scacchi will have their heads.

The laughter that bubbles up in him with that thought probably is verging on crazy.

A flower-head looms, and true, he's not been paying the most attention. It explodes. Duke looks up and sees Audrey leaning out way beyond her centre of gravity, with Nathan in doubly precarious territory clutching her lower half, above.

Halfway up, there's a sort of... of rumble, like the world shifting. It's not an earth tremor, Duke thinks. It doesn't just come from the ground, but seeps out of the air, from the very fibres of the world. Reality starts to move sideways.

It's happening again, and Audrey... Audrey is up there...

Nathan is already clutching her, he'll be fine, but Duke...

It's too far, he thinks, frantic, gauging the distance. It's too far and the chair's too slow. Too far, and he can't feel his feet. He acts almost without thought, throwing himself into the impossible, or what looked impossible a moment ago. Standing up in the chair, he leaps onto the rail in front. Balance demands a more instinctive approach without the sensation of weight on your feet, and he's not used to it, but there's no time for doubt as he charges up the high-wire insanity of the rail. He has to leave Audrey and Nathan's sight as the rail spirals the tower once further. A flower head takes some chunk out of him before he punches it away and then, somehow salvaging his balance, manages to shoot it.

It costs him precious seconds. His skin is starting to change into something grey -- no, white, spreading out in patches which join together with a darker seam like scales. He can't help but think he's lucky he has Nathan's curse right now, because he feels nothing, and he can't imagine any of this would feel good.

Audrey's ahead, reaching, yelling, determined. Nathan, behind her, just looks horrified. Duke doesn't want to guess what they're seeing. His senses reel. Something -- some key part of himself -- is being coated over, an alien other subsuming his consciousness, and he's starting to fade. He has just enough of himself left to reach out and grab Audrey's hand.

"Duke! No, no, no!" Both her hands grind into his.

He can feel that.

That, as much as anything, snaps him back from his journey into freakdom, like his sanity's strung on elastic. "Audrey..." he groans back, clinging to her. Thought is clear again, and he's aware enough to be surprised by Nathan's free arm around his waist, helping haul him onto the platform. It doesn't seem like Nate gets any blood on himself, but he could have.

"Stay with us," Nathan says fiercely.

"I am still--" Duke collapses on his rump, held between Audrey and Nathan, who are also clutching each other. Audrey grasps his hand with only one of hers now. She's holding onto Nathan's elbow hard enough to turn his flesh white, too. "Still here..." But Duke has seen the warping effect of Mrs Scacchi retreat but not completely fade from his skin. He plants his other hand over Audrey's, noticing the hand she hasn't directly touched is much worse. The appearance of the limb improves. It doesn't return to normal.

"It's finished," Nathan says. "Duke, it's finished, let her go."

No. No, damn it! Did he say that aloud or not? He knows he's not all the way one of those things, but he's not right either. She hasn't cured him yet!

Audrey says tightly, admonishing, "I don't think it's going to do any more."

Duke lets Nathan break his grip -- swinging sharply aside after he does it, when a smudge of left-over blood on Duke's hands changes his eyes silver. Both Duke and Audrey turn their heads to follow him, their breath catching, but Nathan's shoulders sag and his harsh lines relax again. Audrey transfers her touch to Duke's face, cupping the sides of his jaw and making him look up at her. "It's all right. Duke, we're going to fix this."

"Right," he manages to echo. His voice sounds normal. He just hopes his hard-to-muster smile doesn't look too awful on whatever it is that she sees.

***

Duke's coherent and seems psychologically sound, so far as Duke gets, which is probably more than they had any right to hope for after an unadulterated dose of Mrs Scacchi. Likewise for Nathan after catching that stray speck of blood. Whatever happened last time didn't happen again, so he figures either it's the quantities involved or the fact he was fighting; some kind of battle rage. Maybe a bit of both.

The improvements of Audrey's magic touch make Duke's hands almost normal, paler than usual but holding only faint traces of the pattern. Progressing up his arms, the change is more prominent, and the skin of his face and legs looks almost like a jigsaw of bone plates. They've seen worse samples of what he could've turned into. Lack of capacity to feel any difference himself might be what's freaking Duke out as much as anything, though he seems to find morbid fascination in the discovery his face makes a hard noise when he taps on it.

So he taps on it. Repeatedly. Trust Duke to use this to find a whole new way to annoy Nathan.

Armour, is what Nathan thinks when he looks at the changes. He wonders if Mrs Scacchi's Trouble has a deliberate sense of irony or if Duke's temporary Trouble had some input in manifesting this change.

Duke's hair looks to have hardened, too, but since that's guaranteed to upset him further, an idea with less appeal than usual at the moment, Nathan bites his tongue on pointing it out.

Perversely, he'd reach out and touch Duke -- pat his arm, grip his shoulder, some gesture of comfort to reassure him he's still human. Except right now, Nathan could feel it, and Duke couldn't. Except right now, Nathan doesn't dare.

Besides, Duke has Audrey for that. Shortness of temper at the thought helps Nathan break his attention from their latest disaster, turn his back on both his friends and focus on Mrs Scacchi's front door.

A few of the ornamental paving slabs from the yard provide the solid footing under their feet. Much of Mrs Scacchi's house is incorporated into the stem of the tower, and what's left is a jumble that perches only one storey high, all clinging on at mismatched angles. He can see the kitchen window, recognisable by a clutter of old soap bottles, in a wall offset from vertical by several degrees. The grossly over-fanged cat stares out fixedly from the corner of another window, hunched behind an overhanging curtain, trembling, its body moving visibly with each thump of its small, stressed heart. Even the monster cat is scared spitless.

The door they knocked upon only hours before is still hooded by a shallow, sagging porch that juts onto the precarious platform they stand on. The wisteria has become a horror, flowers the fingers of corpses, dangling down in clusters, stench putrid. But it seems essentially harmless, not spurred to action by Nathan's cautious steps closer.

He reaches out and tries the handle. Nothing immediately fatal happens when he eases back the door, so he tries for another inch or so. His gun is ready in his other hand.

Most of the hallway is in the tower stem. The front door opens more or less onto the kitchen. Arlene stands with her back to him. Either she hasn't heard his entrance or isn't reacting to it. He sees that her attention fixes something on the floor. The floor is also skewed at an angle, meaning the slumped figure Arlene stares at is sort of braced, wrapped around a table leg that's halted its slide. Nathan's still trying to process the tableau when Arlene turns around.

She looks human. That's the first thing he registers; the first other human face he's seen since leaving John at the Gull. The second is that there's blood on her and a carving knife in her hand. She sees him and her face wipes blank. "I'm so sorry," she says, in a voice drained and strangely flat. "She tried to kill me." Her flowing neck, as she wipes at it with her fingers and reveals a savage bite shaped by a human-like jaw, attests to that, before the blood rushes back to cover the wound.

Nathan trails his eyes back down reluctantly to the lump at her feet, which would be unrecognisable if it wasn't clad in clothes suddenly horribly familiar. A splash of sky blue and prim white beneath all the red.

"It's all right," is all he can think of to say, "I had to do it, too." It's not all right, but he understands anyway.

Arlene fumbles open a drawer for a clean tea towel. She presses a motif of bright oranges and lemons to the wound on her neck.

Nathan is aware of Duke and Audrey crowding the doorway behind him, and manages to move his still-uncooperative legs to step aside and make way for them. Arlene's face hesitates only a moment before she says with heavy, overwhelming relief, "Oh. Duke." She looks at the knife, unfixes her fingers from it and lets it fall, and takes a step towards him. She might as well have flung herself into his arms. Duke pushes past Nathan, grasps her and pulls her in against him. Their two heads, dark and tawny, are level, and she presses her cheek to his with distance still in her eyes. One of her hands is locked between them, clamping the towel to her collarbone. Nathan sees how Duke's eyes turn harder as he registers the lack of sensation from her grip, but he says, "You're all right. God, Arlene."

"Well," she says, pulling back, "I'm not altered." With the backs of her fingers, she touches his chin, the whitish, hard skin and the spiky protrusion of beard. There is no humour whatsoever in her face. She turns around, almost 360 degrees, and at the end of it bends down to retrieve the knife. Her fingertips patter a dangerous dance on the sharpened edge of the blade as she makes as though to speak, then doesn't.

"What happened?" Audrey asks, gently prompting.

"Mary and Sharyn brought half the neighbourhood around." In all his years with the police, Nathan's seldom heard a more dispassionate report of harrowing emotion and events than she proceeds to deliver. "They were in the garden, hanging over the fence. Shouting that they wanted Ma out. I told them what I told you. She's sick. She can't help it. Their problems would be over soon anyway. Then Mary and Sharyn pushed past me and got in the house. Brought their poison right to her death bed. Officer Parker... Nathan... All that hateful fuel added to hers. How did they think it was going to end? I heard people outside going crazy. Sharyn ran out. Mary... attacked Ma. She was already starting to turn into that. I managed to knock her out and tie her up. The house was rumbling and shaking around me. By the time I finished, everything was different." She ends, matter-of-factly, with a baffling conclusion. "Don't worry. I understand what needs to be done. It's right that I should. I can't let anyone else."

She raises the knife without giving the rest of them time to catch up. Duke barely reaches out and stops her before she leaves the kitchen for her Ma's room, folding his fingers over hers to immobilise the blade. "No. Arlene! There is no way in hell--"

"She's unconscious," Arlene responds. "Delirious. I can't reason with her. There's no other way left to end this. People are dying."

"We can't let you kill your mother," Audrey says, stepping up. "It's not--" Stalling Arlene's protest with a raised hand. "You don't understand. This is about the Troubles. You can't do it." She doesn't turn around to look at him, but Nathan feels the sweat break out on his face in advance of the bomb. "Nathan has to."

***

Duke's breath catches. He's been seeing it coming since the Gull. He didn't think he was special, but if she'll do it to Nathan, she'll do it to anyone. That's no comfort, and it literally takes his breath away that Audrey Parker, knowing how Nathan feels about this (knowing how she feels about Nathan), can calmly stand and make that declaration.

Then again, this Trouble is a fucking horror, proof there are things out there worse than the Crocker legacy. The old lady's dying anyway. Arlene will do it if they don't. Arlene might be in direct line of fire. Duke's not proud of it and the Rev. Driscoll would be delighted, that fucking old carrion crow, but Duke would do it. There are some battles you do have to choose.

Nathan doesn't look surprised except, maybe, that Audrey said it. He stands very still. Duke hasn't seen his expression change in about a minute.

"No," Arlene denies coldly. "Why?"

"Mix-up," Nathan responds. "I've got Crocker's curse."

She just looks blank. Duke tells her hoarsely, "I can -- usually -- kill Troubles. Which is 'can' in the sense of having done it all of twice, and one of those wasn't on purpose."

"Arlene," Audrey says, "You have to know there's a chance you'll inherit your mother's affliction. We can't let that happen."

"I won't do this," Arlene asserts.

"You don't know what you'll do," Duke murmurs, setting a hand on her shoulder, which he doesn't feel. He could tell her, he never dreamed he could be Troubled, either, but Nathan's there so it doesn't seem the place.

"It's for the best," says Audrey. "Look out of the window. This Trouble ripped Haven apart. We have to know this one is gone for good. And you... you don't want this."

Taking that perfectly literally, Arlene does go to the window, and looks. She murmurs, "Ma always told me that I'd have to bear it someday. I didn't know that it could go this far."

And maybe it can't, unless you're old, sick, dying and shunned by the whole damned world, Duke thinks. Nathan squeezes Arlene's other shoulder briefly as he walks past all of them into the centre of the jumbled house, and it's only after that they both realise he took the knife from her hand as well. Audrey follows him. Like a guard dog, Duke thinks, then corrects himself -- no, a sheep dog, there to ensure he enacts his role properly.

Audrey will fix the Troubles. Whatever it takes.

No, he hasn't really forgiven her. Just agreed to move on, because he already has one good example why you shouldn't live an endless cycle of recrimination, and what happens when friendship... love... turns sour.

Arlene goes after them both and Duke has no choice but to follow, though there's no way in hell he wants to watch this.

The old lady seems small and withered amid the covers. Her eyes are closed and only flicker when Nathan sits down on the edge of the bed. He takes her hand, knife held out of sight against his thigh. "Mrs Scacchi..."

"Nate Wuornos..." She worms her hand out over his, patting it, and keeps mumbling, though none of them have any idea what she's trying to say. The word Arlene surfaces in there and Arlene takes her mother's other hand.

"I'm sorry, Ma. Something terrible's happened to Haven. I know you keep saying it's so, but... I think now it really is time to say goodbye."

The old lady is barely moving again. The world might judge dry-eyed Arlene for the capacity to do this calmly. Duke's not going to.

Nathan's calm is cracking. "I... I can't," he gulps, turning aside. The knife shivers in his hand. He extends the arm, weapon dangling at the end of his fingers like he wants it as far from him as possible, yet doesn't quite have the conviction to release it. "We have to find... there's got to be another way."

Duke releases a sigh which is -- he discovers, at the crux -- ninety percent relief, and turns to Audrey, opening his mouth to back the decision with everything he has. This is too much to ask.

There's a small, slick noise behind him.

It's done by the time he looks back. That choked sob wasn't Mrs Scacchi. Nathan cut deep and quick, and she's gone, quiet in her stupor, quieter than seems fitting, but gone. Her blood covers Nathan's hand. He groans, hunching over, muscles going tight and strained with the rush of useless strength. He lifts his arm across his face to cover his silvered eyes, while Simon Crocker's legacy neutralizes the curse.

There's a moment of vertigo, of -- freefall, and Duke remembers with brief alarm that they are quite high in the air.

The room jolts, coming back to earth. It's even messier than it was, and -- larger, somehow. Missing pieces have insinuated their way back in. He doesn't feel any different, but when he raises his hands, frantically studying them, his skin looks normal.

Nathan's arm slides down to his mouth to cover another raw sob, not quite muffling it.

Duke can't move. His legs have taken root. Audrey, it seems, is the same, or perhaps she thinks Nathan won't want any comfort from her; you couldn't blame him if he didn't. They stare at each other.

Arlene leans down to close her mother's eyes. She tucks the sheet up over the slit throat, obscuring it from view. Then, it's she who turns to Nathan and pulls him into a hug. Her cheek presses against his, her eyes not quite dry anymore. She guides his elbow until his arms are properly folded around her back. Nate, already startled out of his breakdown, raises his head and stares blankly over her shoulder.

It's like double-vision.

Duke can say this about Arlene; dating her had been a weird ride. She wasn't interested in the things the other girls liked, messed around and talked shit more like one of his buddies, didn't want the usual girl-boy transactions of flowers, chocolates, words. Later, he'd figured out he was essentially dating a man in a more socially acceptable body. Which paled beside the revelation when even later, he figured out which man.

Looking at them now, together, the resemblance is obvious. It's so obvious it's deeply weird, when he thinks about it.

Mrs Scacchi's arm is hanging down over the bedclothes behind them. On its wrinkled skin, he can see a distinctive, familiar pattern, etched in ink.

He thinks about Max Hansen, with his own tattoo, and about Garland Wuornos, picking up after Hansen's trail of destruction.

No. Absolutely no. It's impossible. Sheer speculation. It's... something he's never, ever thinking about again.

Nathan pulls clear, patting Arlene's shoulder awkwardly. He seems to have got it back together. As he stands up, turning away from the rest of them, Audrey stops looking on the verge of a startled interjection and shuts her mouth and swallows instead. The tension in Nathan's shoulders is as tight as Duke's ever seen it.

"When we get back to the Gull, to Nadine," Nathan begins, voice low and harsh, but rising, "I want this gone. Because you'll be getting this back--" he rounds on Duke, confrontational despite the fact no-one's making an argument "--I took this one. Okay? It's done. So you take this back, and we hope to hell nothing like this ever happens again, so you never have to do it. And so help me, if I hear the word 'hypocrite' from your lips, I will--"

"Nathan," says Audrey. "We'll fix it."

Duke's glad she does. He seems to have forgotten the power of speech, so he has no capacity to defend himself. No, he's not going to argue, this time, that Nathan took the hit for him. They had to. Whoever -- someone had to. In Duke's peripheral vision Nathan winds down, lowering his threatening hand, sagging and slumping with a worn out sigh. Duke is drawn to look out of the window, where the wisteria hangs, white flower clusters swaying in the breeze and sunshine, framing a garden and a world that's alive again. A few human figures linger, dazed, in the street.

"We'll fix it," Audrey promises Nathan again.

***

It doesn't work out like that.

It turns out that heading up the recovery effort is more important than getting their right curses returned to them, whatever promises Audrey made or any, for that matter, Nathan made to himself. It's when they walk out through the kitchen and find Mary Mercer dead on the floor, and Mary again, that it hits home and Nathan realises the aftermath is going to be staggering.

People in the street, if they're the lucky ones, are scratching their heads, wondering where the last two hours went and how they acquired their unexplainable bruises and scrapes. Arlene drives the three of them to the Gull in her car, where reunited with his restored Ford Bronco and police radio, Nathan musters up the rest of Haven's groggy and confused emergency responders, and that's the rest of the day.

The night and most of the next day, too, though by then the emphasis is starting to change to the inevitable paperwork. Nathan sleeps on the couch at the station, aware at some point of Audrey talking at him acerbically and then going home. Aware of every bump, crease and crumb, too, so he doesn't sleep well.

Most of all, he feels like an enemy inhabits his body, parasitic and scratching, a restless presence he needs to be rid of.

Audrey reappears only hours later, finds him up and working and pushes at him a sandwich and a black coffee, watching him 'til he finishes them. He can't remember eating anything but donuts in the last 36 hours. The last protein to pass his lips was at breakfast two days ago.

She says, "We are going to go to Nadine and fix this today, or so help me."

Nathan thinks they don't have time.

One more body, found in a park in the centre of town, somehow missed thus far, proves him right. It turns into paperwork that turns into other paperwork, plus a press conference which earns him the undying hatred of the demanding public -- whose demands are, reasonably enough, for an explanation. He's going to have to turn to the Teagues and frankly beg, on this one.

His first headache in years is a pounding, splitting, drive-you-to-distraction bastard. The novelty of pain is overrated.

The dead number thirteen with that last, missed corpse, unlucky for all of them, though the number is a sheer miracle as far as Nathan is concerned, coming out of the nightmare and devastation with a far lighter toll than they had any right to expect.

Still, the hospital's capacity is tried severely dealing with the injured. He feels guilty for setting the station's rabid psychiatrist to work on the out-of-town witnesses who had clear heads through the events, but he'll live with it. Much better than with some of his other actions. By the third afternoon the focus of his efforts has been waylaid to extricating Haven citizens from charges incurred in surrounding districts which escaped Mrs Scacchi's Haven-wide curse but not a few straggling madmen.

It's this Audrey finally drags him away from with a fierceness that won't brook any resistance.

For the first time that makes him realise he hasn't seen Duke in over 48 hours, and as far as he knows, neither has she.

***

So they leave him. For two fucking days.

All right, Duke would feel more justified being pissed off about that if people hadn't died and the town wasn't a disaster zone.

They drop him off at the Gull, though he has the feeling it's mostly to pick up Nathan's car, then they're gone, and Duke ends up driving John and Nadine to the emergency department in Camden. The ER staff are more interested in him than either of his charges, but he ducks out and returns to the Cape Rouge. Audrey and Nathan are still off saving the world, or at least picking up the messy pieces. He kind of expects, though, that they'll be in touch later, and focuses on treading water until then.

Nathan's Trouble needs a guide book, and if he hadn't spent so much time watching Nathan over the years, he wouldn't have a hope. Just because he was getting kind of Zen about it toward the end, having worse body problems to worry about, doesn't mean he wants to be abandoned to Nathan's shit indefinitely.

Again, he'd be pissed off, if Nathan wasn't in the same boat and practically on the verge of a breakdown last he saw him.

Duke retreats to the bathroom with a first aid kit and strips down in front of the mirror, going over every inch of his body by sight. That much, he knows. He's relieved not to find that hidden serious injury he's been freaking about all day, just a morass of minor scrapes. He washes, not feeling the water sliding over his skin, not feeling the heat or cold and having to err on the side of cold, and it sucks, it really does. He's knocked back by how much it sucks, and this? Is just the simple pleasure of having a shower that's being denied him.

Which is like a red-rag challenge, and still in the bathroom, he has to experiment by taking his dick in his hand and trying for all he's worth to get himself off. For all his determination, he knows the mental component is key and he's not in the right frame of mind and can't do it. Thinking about Nathan being able to feel him right now but being somewhere God damn else doesn't help in the least.

Giving up, annoyed and frustrated, it occurs to him to pee, just in case he can't feel his body telling him to, and isn't that a heap of fun? That's one check that has got to slip up sometimes, and Duke is excruciatingly embarrassed on Nathan's account, to be finding out his secrets this way.

After all that time locked away, there should have been some attempt at contact, but Duke's phone log shows nothing. He doesn't feel hungry, but surely he's got to be, so he cooks. The food smells great, tastes great, but he can't tell if it's hot or cold, can't feel the shape or texture as he rolls it around his mouth. This much, he's done as a thought experiment before, cooking for Nathan. Actually experiencing it is... weird. Frustrating. Saddening.

He drinks. A great deal of wine. It's late by then, it's a wholly appropriate response to the situation, and it seems there's nothing to lose. Audrey and Nathan still haven't been in touch.

Duke passes out at the kitchen table and wakes up to light streaming through the windows, with a bad taste in his mouth but no hangover. Of course. He gets up from the chair wondering what his back would feel like if he could feel it, and finds a text message sent by Audrey at 4AM: 'Crazy here. Sorry. Are you OK? Can you wait?'

Unsociable hour aside, at least she finally remembered him. He sends back, 'OK. How's Nate?'

Communication dribbles at tortuous intervals throughout the day: 'Bearing up. Sorry, but it's going to be longer.' 'How much longer?' 'What happened to Nadine?' 'Took Nadine to Camden ER. John has his balls back already. My turn soon???' 'Thanks. We checked, Nadine home now. Sorry, but I think it has to be tomorrow.'

Duke ventures out and finds that, without the particular focus of disaster looming, it's deeply awkward to walk the world on feet that can't feel the ground. It's like he's in a spotlight, hyper-aware, convinced that other people will pick up on some abnormality in him. His actions are harder to control; he wouldn't notice if his clothes were awry or any other number of small but personally embarrassing details; wouldn't know if someone tapped him on the shoulder... or stuck tacks in his back.

He listens to people talking shit and speculation about yesterday, but Haven looks remarkably normal. He should feel relief, achievement, satisfaction, something, but it's like the numbness is spreading inward. The absence of obvious crisis does make him start to think he should try resuming business as normal, even if he's not back to normal. It isn't as though he's sick. Nathan lives and works and hurls himself in pursuit of dangerous criminals like this, so really, he has to stop treating it like a sick break.

He returns to the Cape Rouge, where he makes calls to establish which of his staff are in any condition to re-open the Gull tomorrow, arranges to come in early to fix the shit that's broken, and imagines handiwork with Nathan's Trouble will be all sorts of fun, too.

By that time, evening's closing in again. He doesn't drink. He waits for... nothing. Eventually, he meditates, sort of.

Meditation is supposed to be finding the stillness, shutting out the signals, and regards his physical world right now there's nothing but stillness; if he shuts his eyes and plugs his ears, an almost total blank. His bed could be made of rocks today and it'd make no difference. The other kind of meditation, acknowledging the body, feeling out its sensations and nuances, is right out. But as he sits, and for hours just breathes and focuses on all the nuances of not feeling, he does determine a kind of body-sense.

He knows his arms and legs are there, knows where they'll be if he moves them in a given direction, though it's easier with the confirmation of sight. For a while, he diverges into lying flat, practicing bringing his fingertips together in front of him from a starting point of arms stretched sideways to full extent, opening his eyes when he thinks he's got it. It's not as hard as he thought, and improves with practice.

He comes to the conclusion Nathan isn't disabled (so he can stop getting twitchy about that concept), just... hampered. There's something else at work here, at least partially compensating. He's not sure if it's all natural or not, but given that Nathan's affliction isn't natural to start with, does the distinction really matter?

He wonders if, maybe someday, all this might help him get under Nathan's skin again in more interesting ways.

The morning of the third day, the text message from Audrey says, 'Corpse in a tree. It'll be later.' He notices she's stopped even trying to apologise by now.

Even if it doesn't happen today, he already decided that, for everything else, it's time. He lugs his tools and his truck and himself to the Gull, patches up the door and the bits and pieces broken on the inside, and only hammers his thumb instead of the nail without noticing the one time. He risks a peep into Audrey's apartment, which looks fine, and fixes some minor damage to her stairs.

His staff turn up late morning as instructed, and they turn their focus to more superficial cleaning, then stuff like menus and buying in stock to compensate for interrupted deliveries. Duke does the grocery run.

Afternoon, Audrey sends the text, 'We're doing this. Insurance office, main street, 4.30PM.'

Fucking finally, and he really tries not to be pissed as he makes his way there, because it's been two full days of living without a trace of anything that he'd call life and he hasn't even heard from Nathan.

***

"I don't know what I did," Nadine says, trite and defensive, still pissed off, with a bruise on her forehead and a band-aid on her chin, but apparently one of the luckiest at her firm because it's she who's healthy enough to be minding the store single-handed today. "I don't know how to undo it. My fucking church threw me out, and fuck you. Both of you freaks." She shifts her glare to Audrey. "And you."

She, also, looks busy. Her paperwork and Nathan's might tie, but it would be an epic grudge-match. Nathan sighs. Audrey says, "When you woke up in the Gull, you turned John back. What did you do?"

"I didn't, I told you. It just happened."

"Well," says Audrey, with excess patience, "what did you think?"

"I guess..." She enters into it, briefly. "I guess he couldn't be all bad, you know? There he'd been, guarding me all that time... probably saved my life. Maybe I misjudged him."

Nathan surreptitiously looks at Duke, who eyes him a bit sullenly back and says, keeping his voice low, "You could've come last night. Even the night -- okay, maybe not the night before. But last night."

Nathan blinks. Nothing of the kind even occurred to him. "I was... working." And, wait, what? "You can't feel."

"But you can." Duke barely mouths it, because Audrey and Nadine are suddenly watching them, overly closely. They've missed something.

"You see?" Nadine says, pointing a perfectly manicured finger. He's reminded of claws, but she's had her nail job fixed since then. "Arguing. Again. Just like back at the restaurant, and I thought, if they'd just quit-- Because they're always fighting, everytime I see them, except that once. You should see what I get in this job. People who can't agree drive me insane." That seems fairly ironic, considering Nadine is not the most agreeable person Nathan has ever encountered. "Most of what's needed is just a bit of understanding."

Audrey gets that sort of semi-evil smile that makes her eyes glitter dangerously. She waggles her decidedly un-manicured finger in the air between them. "You guys feel like hugging?"

They swap another quick glance. Nathan asks, suspiciously, "Will that work?"

"It might," Duke qualifies, a bit too keenly, so Nathan doesn't actually think he's in it for the part that resembles a plan. He eyes Duke, who's extending both arms expectantly, and declines with a firm shake of his head.

Audrey's halfway between exasperation and laughing at him as she slaps her palm on the corner of Nadine's desk. "Come on, Nathan! I am not putting up with that sorry-ass ghost who's been haunting your office for another two days. What's one little hug when your, you know, mental health depends on it? You've done more than that in the past." It's almost a jeer. He catches the twist in Nadine's expression as she realises.

"Real subtle, Parker."

"Oh, who gives a crap?" she scolds him back. She sketches a gesture, pointing inward with both hands, that isn't subtle either. "Make nice. Now."

"Not a sideshow, Audrey," Duke mutters, putting his arms down, also pissed off. Her face falls a bit.

All of a sudden, it all rushes in on Nathan. He's tired. He can't pretend what happened with Duke in the past never happened, he sure as hell doesn't want to keep Duke's murderous legacy, and Audrey's right, who the fuck cares? He'll touch Duke in semi-public if that's what it takes to prove to Nadine that they do stop arguing sometimes. Though, from that face on her, he doubts she'll like what they do when they stop arguing any better. He steps forward abruptly, reaching to grasp Duke's jaw in his hands and leaning in to bring their lips together for the first kiss they've shared that he actually feels. He's barely aware of Audrey, making some comment in the background. His attention has far too many other things to contend with. There's the brush of stubble on Duke's cheeks and soft hair at his fingertips, the texture and taste (the part that's familiar; the part that he knows) of lips and tongue. God, he can feel Duke's tongue, sliding over his; though it's tentative, not quite knowing what to do, because this time, Duke's the one lost without a map. Damn it, damn it, Duke's right. He should have been at the Cape Rouge last night. Then again, without two nights of no sleep, it's doubtful he'd be at the point of doing even this much.

After the initial surprise, Duke does try to respond. Enthusiastically, if clumsily. Can't feel his lips; can't feel any of this. Still knows it's happening, though. Nathan is wholly familiar with that philosophical position.

...Knows it now, again. Duke groans, the noise soft, the vibration fading... and Nathan catches the sound, feeling the echo of it on his tongue as the last of sensation dies. He keeps his hand gripping the back of Duke's neck for a further moment, not wanting it to feel like this has to end the moment it works, lingering a few last seconds to give Duke a chance to feel, too, before he pulls away.

"Ew," says Nadine, waving both her hands in dismissal and spinning to show them her back.

"That was--" Duke starts, but merely concludes, after a pause, "successful." His narrow study of Audrey displays some distrust. His body language has changed completely. Nathan watches him shake out his limbs, rub and stretch, groan at undiscovered muscle injuries and countless aches, and being Duke, he swears quite a bit. Under the assault of feeling, of fresh and unexpected pain, it takes him some seconds to work up to the final conclusion of, "Thank God." He fondles his crotch and breathes out in sharp, heartfelt relief. "Oh, thank God."

Yes, and it is such an unutterable relief, now Nathan processes it, as the pangs of that moment of loss pass, to feel nothing again. His headache's left an echo where it's been, but his body is dead to him, and his own again. The world can't hurt him, and he's not going to hurt anyone else. The comfort that lies in that thought is absolute.

But Duke--

Nathan watches Duke's antics and doesn't know how he can celebrate the return of all that weight. Although when Duke looks back and says, with a strange curiosity, "You're smiling," Nathan knows they're thinking the same thing. It comes to him that maybe -- maybe they've both been given the curses they can bear. One thing is certain, it's as well it's Duke with this silver-eyed, murderous power, and not him.

When it was first passed to him, it crossed Nathan's mind for some half-second, Good. In his hands, he could ensure it was never misused. Of course, that never would be how it works.

If Crocker says he's going to fight this, Nathan's pretty sure he can trust that, since fighting tooth and nail is one thing you can rely on Duke to do. It's obvious in his reaction now that Duke, incredibly, trusts himself with it. Sure, he's afraid of what could happen, but he's not spending every moment teetering on the edge.

But maybe, maybe it's because he doesn't know yet where the edge is, Nathan thinks darkly. Okay, he had help, lots of help, to get there, and in the circumstances can't blame Duke for the push. But that doesn't mean it won't happen again. That's why he has to keep watch, more than ever now he knows intimately the danger Duke has to be protected from.

Nathan suspects, from the reflection in Duke's expression, that his smile has turned hard on his lips -- but he can't be sure, because mercifully, blissfully, he can't feel it.

***

His body.

He can feel it all; his arms, his legs, his cock. His lips, Nathan's lips, for fuck's sake. Of course, ask the man for a hug and that pretty much guarantees you'll never get it, and if he has to give you something, it'll be something else instead. Nathan's the very definition of contrary.

He may not have come around to the Cape Rouge last night (and it has occurred to Duke that he could, also, have phoned Nathan last night), but Duke thinks it makes up for that, a little. He didn't imagine the small, withdrawn smile on Nathan's face, right after, and he has to take heart that the choice was there and Nathan chose to reclaim his Trouble with a kiss.

"Hey, let's go," Audrey says, taking hold of them, an arm from each, and starting to walk them firmly away. "Before Nadine has any other thoughts that might change your outlook on life."

Duke knows enough now to recognise the power Audrey has when she curls her small hand around Nathan's bare arm. For Duke, she isn't any longer that spear-point focus of unparalleled sensation, but it's still... delightful. Everything's delightful; the breeze, the sun on his skin, his clothes hanging against him, the wall he brushes his fingers over as he leaves Nadine's office building...

Life has resumed.

While it's true he has a new perspective on Nathan's physical regimens and methods of compensation, he didn't get close to figuring out what the hell compensation there can ever be for the simple fact of not being able to feel the touch of another person or even a... a fucking wall. Under the isolating weight of that, Duke knows now, it's amazing Nathan's as functional a human being as he manages to be.

The glances they've been exchanging since they exchanged Troubles started at exultation, but they've been winding downward to something cagier. An unpleasant anxiety pools in Duke's stomach as he imagines Nate registering all the things he could have discovered, in two days alone with Nathan's affliction.

Duke knows what Nathan discovered; helped him do it. Won't ever forget that crazed, silver-eyed fighting abandon. Looking at Nathan's face brings him to realise how very wrong Nadine and her Trouble were. Being in each other's shoes won't help fix anything.

It'll just give them more ammunition.

"Cheer up, you guys," Audrey says, almost desperately bright... although underneath it, a little lost, a little helpless, as if she's wondering where and how the mood changed. She halts and pulls them around to face each other. They step apart. As much as they might, with her holding in the centre of them.

She offers, with wounded encouragement, "At least the fairy tale ended with a kiss."

END