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Six days after the armory goes up in a flash of light, there's a flicker of something on his drive home.
It's just a silhouette, really. Tall. Lean. More shadows and glare from the streetlights than anything else, even with his still souped up senses. Nathan can read most street signs from a block away, but he can't see anything of features, of texture, here.
Familiarity and fear twist through his gut in equal, unexplainable measure.
When he pulls up to the corner - window rolled down a cautious inch, sidearm in reach - there’s no one there.
Two days later, it’s the same.
Same street corner. Same silhouette. Same twist of fear that only amplifies as he lets the engine idle in the middle of the street, a stand-off with a figure that isn’t really there. Sensation of the steering wheel under his palms, his fingertips, starts to drop out, his chest constricting, and he has to force himself to breathe through it, to press his hands bruise-hard against the wheel until the pain of it is noticeable and undeniable. Until he’s sure it’s not just resistance he’s feeling.
The Troubles are over.
This -
This is just a trick of light.
There’s a pattern to it.
His days are shorter, work slower. Cats in trees and noise ordinance violations, things they habitually let slip through the cracks due to lack of resources and time, aren’t anything he’s used to, and sometimes he’s home by five. Five-thirty. Even in winter, there’s still streaks of light in the sky then and, on those days where he cuts out of work hours before he would’ve mere weeks ago, there’s never anyone there, just a lone stop sign.
On days when he stays late to catch up on paperwork, when Stan broaches the topic of the clutter still littering Audrey’s old desk and then bolts at the flash of grief-stricken anger that he can’t tamp down on fast enough, when he meets Dwight after hours to drink and not talk, he won’t get home until eight or nine. Haven - at least the parts of it left intact - has turned into a sleepy little town almost overnight and the side roads are always emptier than not by then, people locked up safe in their houses after nightfall, residual fear and an inclination towards paranoia keeping them on edge. Nathan understands that. But it’s different for him. He doesn’t go home to a house full of loved ones, he goes home to an empty house, four walls that’ve seen less of him in the last year than the inside of the station, than the property the Gull sits on. Four walls that’ve still seen enough of Audrey to make this that much harder.
He goes home to loss.
Loss, and a figure on the street corner, leaned against the length of the stop sign in what he’s come to identify as a lazy sort-of sprawl. Familiar, yet not. Like spring break and long drives and easy laughter. Things he knew once, what feels like a whole other life ago.
“When you saw Duke - ”
Dwight’s fingers stutter around his glass, face emotionless, just that twitch of his fingers before careful control resumes. It’s the first thing either of them has said in what feels like hours. It’s the first time Nathan’s said Duke’s name since they were standing in front of a wall of fog, taking their orders from a ghost he couldn’t see.
“When you saw him,” Nathan continues, voice stronger, “did you - what was it like?”
It’s not the question he wants to ask, exactly, but he’s having trouble piecing together the ones he does want. Dwight is - he knows Dwight’s in his corner, but Dwight was a co-worker before he was a friend, someone who was holding his leash for a time, and vulnerability isn’t easy for Nathan, not when he was vulnerable to so much for so long in the physical sense, not when he grew up with a father like his. He’s not sure he can let Dwight see all the guilt and self-doubt he’s got stored up, the way he doesn’t quite trust himself, his judgment, still. Again.
Dwight considers him.
“Why do you want to know?”
There’s no excuse he can give that Dwight won’t see right through. He knows that. He empties his glass and pulls in a breath that does little to settle him. Wishes he knew how to better center himself; counts of ten never did much for him, not like they did for Duke. “I’ve been seeing...something. Someone.”
“Duke?”
“Yeah,” he admits.
It’s the first time for that too.
Even to himself.
Dwight looks at him a while, long enough to be disconcerting, and then, “You ever think about putting in for some time off? Get out of town for a bit. Might do you some good.”
“I’m fine.”
Dwight doesn’t call bullshit on that because he’s a good guy and, more importantly, they’re not people who have those kinds of conversations. Dwight isn’t going to press him any further, not the way Audrey or Duke would’ve, asking if he’s getting enough sleep, asking him if he’s remembering to eat. Instead, he just says, “okay.”
“It was - like he was right there in front of me,” Dwight adds, eventually. “Same Duke as always. Pain in the ass about it, but. He wanted to help.” It’s not the sort of information he’s looking for, but he resigns himself to it anyways. This was a mistake, he thinks, the second before the penny drops. “The telepathy thing was a little strange.”
Nathan arches an eyebrow. “Telepathy?”
“Heard him in my head.”
“But you saw him?”
Dwight nods. “Never really thought about that before.”
(Nathan can’t stop thinking about it.)
(Later -
Much later, Nathan will sit in his office, after hours, skeleton crew on the other side of a locked door, and filter through a string of search results - articles and case studies and write-ups full of medical jargon he can’t make heads or tails of - and they’ll all be variations on the theme of vocal cord damage due to strangulation.
Twenty minutes in, he’ll have to break to retch up the contents of an empty stomach inside a bathroom stall, door unlatched, tile cool and hard and painful under his knees.)
So, he tries something new.
He parks.
The last house before the cross-street, before the corner and the stop sign and the man in the long dark coat that likes to blink out of view the second he gets too close, is abandoned, has been for a while. He doesn’t know whether the owners picked up and left after the meteor storm, whether it was before that when the Troubles first started ramping up.
Whether they didn’t get a say in the matter.
Nathan tries not to think about it, mostly, while he pulls up in front of it, parks on the street, turns off the ignition and the lights.
Gets out.
Leans up against the hood of the Bronco and waits.
“Talk to me, Duke.”
Silence yawns.
It doesn’t work.
Three times, he tries. Three nights spent out in front of his car, the heels of his boots kicked up against asphalt, arms crossed, watching the street light flicker in and out. An elderly lady across the street walks down her driveway with her cane one night to ask if he’s alright, if he’s lost. Doesn’t recognize him until he tells her he lives just up the street, the second house from the end, right up past that stop sign that he can see from his front porch. He’s shoveled her out during a snowstorm before. He’s shoveled a lot of people up and down this street out.
She doesn’t ask about any man, but she does ask about the flickering street light.
Infrastructure problems, he tells her, and doesn’t know whether or not he means it, whether or not he believes he means it. Tells her to head on inside, that he’ll be on his way soon enough, that he’ll have someone down to check out the light in the morning.
He brings Dwight the night after.
Nathan’s thrumming with energy, with adrenaline, the whole ride over, separate cars for convenience’s sake, and he’s parked and pounding pavement before Dwight’s pulled in all the way, is crowding Dwight against the side of his truck before he’s even halfway out of it. Frantic. “So? Do you see him? Can you hear him?”
Dwight squints into the darkness, expression blank.
Unseeing.
The figure seems to sigh.
Gloria tells him, “if you wanna talk to Duke, talk to me.”
It sticks in his brain like honey to the roof of his mouth. He doesn’t know how much of that statement was metaphor. How much was her trying to tell him something. He’s scared to ask. He’s scared to hope for anything at all.
He drives down the coast to Dwight, to go fishing like Audrey would’ve wanted him to, to get some time away like Dwight keeps telling him to. It’s easy to do things other people want him to. To go where he’s told when he’s told and not have it left up to him. He’s not used to being alone anymore, had let Audrey break him of that, had let Duke remind him it wasn’t always like that. He doesn’t know what to do with himself in their absence, with work slowed down to a steady crawl and nothing left in this world for him to run from.
Nothing left - and then there’s Paige.
He lets her buy him breakfast.
Pancakes, blueberry. Black coffee. Paige takes milk in hers and his mouth twitches, once, twice, before he presses his lips into a thin flat line. She squints at his fingers curled around his fork and keeps asking if he’s sure he’s okay. The damage is superficial and he barely feels the slight sting below his knuckles, is overwhelmed and confused and has to ask the waitress where the restroom is so he can continue the panic attack he started when he was ducked under the hood of her broke-down rental, only to dart back out of it barely a minute later, scared out of his mind that she’s gone.
She isn’t.
She isn’t but he’s shaky and she’s roughly as observant as Audrey.
Paige makes cracks about him switching to decaf, pastes a smile over her worry for a while, but it fades, and he can feel it start to sink in for her that she doesn’t know him at all, has gone to breakfast with a total stranger and her infant son. That he said he was a cop but she never asked for ID, and he casually flashes that, on a hunch, when he pulls out his wallet, offers to pay. She smiles, waves him off, relaxes incrementally, pays the bill.
He asks where she’s staying in Haven and she says she isn’t. Wasn’t. Just passing through, she says, on her way up north, although she guesses that’s on hold now. She doesn’t offer up any details about why she was headed that way, but she does ask after a rental company. There aren’t any in Haven. Last one closed up shortly before the wall locked them off from the rest of the world and there hasn’t been a call for one since. He gives her the name of a bed and breakfast, the same one Audrey was living out of two summers ago, and offers to drive her there.
Nathan stops for gas along the way. Goes inside to pay and comes back out to her sitting up straighter, tense and fighting to cover up her alarm, eyes a touch too wide. When he asks, she says she’s fine, but she must hear the edge of panic in his voice and it only makes her keep closer to the door for the rest of the ride.
He doesn’t get her number but gives her his. Makes her promise to call him if she needs anything at all, no matter the hour. Gets an apprehensive nod and a too fast goodbye, and then she’s gone, bag slung over her shoulder and James in tow. A block away, he notices the corner of his registration sticking out of the glove box, and the block after that he thinks to open it up.
Vickie’s drawing of Audrey stares back at him.
Nathan calls Dwight from the station.
They have a long, closed door conversation about Paige and what she means for the twenty-seven year cycle that isn’t supposed to exist anymore. How to deal with the people who’ll assume she’s Audrey and people who will, inevitably, make the not-so-large leap of logic to viewing her as a bad omen, a sign that this last month has been nothing but a temporary reprieve. It could cause a panic. It will freak her out, at the very least, and Nathan’s probably already done enough of that by accident.
He keeps wishing he knew for sure what Audrey would want.
He keeps wishing he had Duke there to help him figure it out.
It’s after nine by the time he leaves.
The street corner is empty.
It’s empty every night after too.
He tries different times. Different routes. Waits out front of his car again on a windy, bitterly cold night, coat zipped up to his throat, hands shoved deep in his pockets, until he feels stupid and shaken and like he’s lost something all over again, something that might never have been there in the first place.
“You look like crap,” Paige tells him, the following afternoon.
Paige who, three days into her stay and no longer in search for a rental car, found her way into his office demanding an explanation for the drawing. Paige who hadn’t made it thirty feet into the station without two officers calling her Officer Parker and Stan asking where she’d been. Paige who gets distracted from rounding his desk by the framed photo of the two of them still sitting on Audrey’s. She stares at it. She panics and lashes out and Nathan is reminded of just how out of his depth he is here.
It doesn’t go well.
But it goes well enough that she’s sitting across from him no less than twenty-four hours later, cautious but receptive. She brings him coffee as an apology, black like he likes it, cardboard sleeve wrapped round the middle of it so he doesn’t burn his fingers. He stifles a laugh that makes her frown. She studies the dark smudges under his eyes and tells him he looks like crap and flushes like she hadn’t quite meant to be so blunt about it.
“Long night,” he replies.
“I’m sorry,” she says, half over him. “That was - this has just been a lot. To deal with. Four days ago, I was - ” she cuts herself off with a shake of her head, stares down at her hands. “Well, I guess that’s not true either, is it?”
“You are whoever you want to be,” he tells her, leaning forward, not quite reaching out for her, even if reflex makes it a close thing. She’s been understandably skittish around him. Wants to know everything he knows about her but also can’t quite handle the idea that someone she sees as a stranger knows her history better than she does. It’s Audrey’s thirst for knowledge but it’s backed up against Paige’s own reticence, her apparent fear of the unknown, which is so patently against the natural order of things that it makes his head spin a little. Audrey, Sarah, Lucy - they all jumped into the deep end without life jackets. Paige lacks the instinct for it. The post-Troubles model, he thinks, morbidly. “It doesn’t have to matter what came before.”
She smiles at him, weak and wavering at the corners, like she knows that must’ve cost him something, and it had. Glances back at the photo on Audrey’s desk and sighs. “I guess you would know.”
Paige integrates, gradually.
Nathan has to sit down the whole department and explain to them that the woman who comes in every few days to talk to him isn’t Audrey with amnesia again. It doesn’t put an end to the staring exactly but it does stop a lot of the questions, and she starts looking less harried on the days where she does come in, usually bearing coffee, always bearing questions. He introduces her to Vickie, who might as well start her own part-time daycare service with the amount of time she spends watching both Aaron and James. He introduces her to Gloria too, who was around for this two cycles ago, who’s been through Lucy and Audrey and ‘Lexie’, who doesn’t stumble over her name quite like Vickie and some of the officers do, like he catches himself doing internally sometimes.
He can’t do much for the general public, but he has a hunch that Dwight works at it quietly and without want for recognition. Once a cleaner, always a cleaner, he supposes, and there are days where Nathan is infinitely grateful that he isn’t entirely alone in this. Doesn’t know how he would fare otherwise. Isn’t exactly faring well as is, but Paige takes up enough of his time and energy that it’s less noticeable. He’s left with less time to dwell, to sit inside his own head and relive the feeling of Audrey’s hands on his bare skin, fingers pushing through the hair at the nape of his neck, points of contact bright against all of the dullness in a way that’s left all other skin-to-skin contact difficult for him now that he can feel again, a constant reminder of what he’s lost. To sit inside his head and relive the weight of Duke’s body pulled up tight against him, the resistance his limbs kept meeting until, suddenly, they didn’t.
Curiosity progressively gets the better of her too.
She snoops. A lot. He knew that already from her rifling through his glove box her first day in Haven but he leaves her alone in his office after he gets called into a meeting and comes back twenty minutes later to find her going through a stack of personal files left out on Audrey’s desk. She’s fired up the computer too, has found the sticky note with the password for it that Audrey’d taken to keeping in the top drawer in case of emergency or memory loss or both, and she gestures at the screen unabashedly while his feet are still stuck firm on the edge of the threshold. “I don’t recognize him. How come I’ve never seen him before?”
Audrey’s wallpaper is a photo of the three of them, taken somewhere before the Barn but after the cold war between him and Duke had died down, after they’d stopped trying to throw punches and venom at each other at every turn. She’d been trying to create memories, physical artifacts of her time here that couldn’t be erased the way her mind could, and Nathan had been - a pain in the ass about it. So far into his own damn denial about her leaving that giving into her whims felt like surrender, like acceptance. And then, on some random Tuesday when they were at the Gull for reasons that had nothing to do with Troubles or dead bodies, Duke had tucked in against his side, quietly told him to stop in a tone that brooked no argument, and yelled for Audrey to get into frame. So Duke had been the one to take the photo, had been the one to put the easy smile on Audrey’s face and stop some of the churning in his gut, psychosomatic as it was.
Duke was better at fixing things than he ever gave him credit for.
At trying.
He would’ve been better at this. He would’ve been charming and gentle, wouldn’t have blindsided her on day one, wouldn’t have fumbled this half as much. Would’ve had a better answer for her probably, if the situation were reversed, but all Nathan can manage is, “He was a friend.”
“Was?”
“Yeah.”
His voice sounds scratched raw, even to his own ears. Compassion looks the same on Paige as it does on Audrey, and it’s a little too much for him to handle right then. “What happened to him?”
What is he supposed to say to that?
I killed him.
I killed him to save you, to save this town, and it didn’t even matter in the end.
I killed him because he asked me to, because he thought that was his only way out of this on his terms, and I knew better but we were out of time we were always out of time and now there’s nothing but time -
Nathan blinks.
His eyes sting and he can’t think of a single thing to tell her that he won’t choke on, so he doesn’t tell her anything at all.
He packs up Audrey’s stuff the next night.
Stays late to pile books and sheafs of notes into a cardboard box, alongside her favorite coffee mug, half a dozen odd hair bands, and every cheesy knick-knack she ever collected with her name stamped on it - key rings, primarily. He backs up her computer onto a USB drive, tosses that in with her nameplate and the framed photo of them that keeps catching Paige’s attention, and drives home with it riding shotgun, hands shaking against the wheel. He finds a space for it on the top shelf of the closet at the end of the hallway, lid tight to discourage dust from collecting.
Safekeeping.
Paige is awkward around him again.
For days, her presence at the station is limited to a single visit, two minutes of her standing nervously in the doorway, twisting her fingers and asking him if he’s seen Gloria around. There’s not been much call for a ME lately, so he sends her Laverne’s way - she’s got her nose in everyone’s business after all, she’ll know where Gloria is - and watches the tension fall out of her shoulders when she leaves. It shouldn’t be a reaction he mirrors, but it is.
He knows he’s fucking this up.
He doesn’t know how to stop.
Two days later, the rental Dwight drove her to the next town over to retrieve weeks ago - the one that was supposed to take her out of Haven - appears in his driveway. It’s raining, has been more or less all day, the temperature still too low to be anything close to comfortable, and she’s soaked, pulling her coat tighter around herself when he lets her in.
“Sorry, I know it’s - ” she makes a half-hearted motion that could mean anything, could mean the hour or the weather or them, all the space that’s filled up by the woman he remembers her as and the things he won’t tell her. He shakes his head, waves it off and waves her further inside, catches the stutter in her step as she takes in his living room; the quilt still strewn over one side of the couch where he slept last night, the books left open on the coffee table, the lingering smell of soup from dinner. She frowns, worry creasing her brow, but leaves it alone.
Paige doesn’t know him like that.
“I, um...I found something,” she digs in her pockets, pressing something cold and metal into his palm a beat later, a brief brush of contact that doesn’t feel any different to him than anything else. He weighs it in his hand, fingers catching in the cord, and he knows what it is before he looks, has to work himself up to doing so. “It was in her desk. I thought - I thought it might be hers, but it’s...it’s not.”
Duke’s whistle stares back at him.
“It’s his, right? Duke’s?” Her voice shakes on the name, unfamiliar, unsure. Like she doesn’t think she has any right to it. He does, though, with the way she’s struggling to look him in the eye. She thinks he does. “You should have it. Gloria said that’s what he would’ve wanted.”
He swallows, thickly. Nods and clenches his hand closed to cover the tremor, edges digging into his skin in a way that’ll leave marks, that’ll sting. “Yeah.”
Nathan’s not sure if that’s a question or an answer.
(Duke had a will.
Nathan doesn’t - he didn’t ask about specifics. He doesn’t know when he sat down and wrote it out, if it was another warning sign he missed, if it was because of what happened with Wade, if it was because of what happened with his father. Doesn’t know who filed it, didn’t even know anyone had until someone from the courts came down to notify him that he was named a beneficiary, that there was a large sum of money involved, most of his estate in fact.
Bill McShaw drives up the Sunday after. The area where the Gull once stood is a mess of debris, a public safety hazard, and Nathan has a patrol car go by there every few hours. He gets the call at two, and by two-thirty he’s standing side-by-side with Bill overlooking what’s left of the property, wind whipping off the water, his coat left back in the truck.
“Jesus,” Bill exhales, and then, “what the hell happened?”
Nathan shrugs. “You wouldn’t believe me if I told you.”
Bill isn’t talking about the state the Gull’s in, though, and Nathan has to steel himself, against the cold, against the guilt, something like an admission bubbling to the surface. He knew Bill growing up. He was always Duke’s friend, but he’d never been anything but nice to Nathan. Part of Nathan thinks he owes this to him, the truth, ugly as it is. Everyone looks at Nathan like he got the worst of it. Like these are his losses first and foremost, Audrey and Duke, his people. But Duke had friends, had people who’d once thought of him like kin, and he’d cared enough to will the Gull back to Bill in a reality where he believed it to still be standing. There’s something untenable about explaining away what happened to Duke as a random act of Haven - like the sea monsters that took out the building in front of them - instead of the act of desperation and forced hands that it was. Nathan did this, and Nathan’s never been shy of taking responsibility for his actions before.
It’s just this one. More than shooting Howard full of holes, more than anything else he’s done in years, in his entire life, this is the one he wishes he could take back. This is the one he can’t live with. Because it was all for naught.
“So much for second chances, huh?” Bill says, before Nathan can get brave, and that’s that. Bill surveys the damage, tries to figure out what he’s going to do with what’s left of his family’s old restaurant now that it’s been dumped in his lap once more, and Nathan goes back to work.)
He wraps the cord around his knuckles until the circulation starts to cut out, pins-and-needles along the pads of his fingers, spreading downwards, and breathes in.
Paige - who’s never once seen him stick a plastic fork or a safety pin or the point of a knife into the tip of his forefinger, the meat of his hand, skirting the thin skin of his wrist and the twist of veins underneath; who lacks context for any of it - fails to notice.
She comes by his house more, the station less.
Shows up with plastic bags full of takeout not even ten minutes after he gets in the door, shrugs when he calls her on it. He accuses her of conspiring with Laverne, who bakes him cookies and casseroles and things that live in his fridge more than they get eaten, and she shrugs at that too. Tells him to eat and passes over cartons of kung pao and chow mein, tangling her fork in rice noodles and remarking that he has to admit it’s better than canned soup. And it is. She figures out he hates lobster and too much spice tends to overwhelm him, at first, through trial and error, makes fun at him over the former and learns to work around the latter. Exhausts Haven’s limited selection of takeout options and claims a spot on his couch, curled up with her back against the arm, knees drawn up, facing him.
Sometimes she brings James, sometimes she doesn’t. He’s good enough with kids that she asks, once, if he has younger siblings, biting her lip like what she really wants to ask is if he ever had kids but is afraid of the answer, afraid that it’s yes and she’ll be poking at another open wound. He tells her no. He puts enough weight behind it that he hopes she takes it as an answer to her unasked question too. He never ever tells her about James, does his level best to bury any references to James Cogan even if Paige’s last name doesn’t match and neither does her son’s. Her grip on her own identity is shaky enough as is, and there’s no scenario where she takes it well that her son isn’t who she thinks, is presumably the genetic doppleganger of a man born fifty-six years ago, the product of a tryst between himself and the woman who occupied her body four cycles ago. He doesn’t know who the father is, to her. He doesn’t ask either, but there are times when he thinks she’s too smart not to have picked up on the fact that her personal history doesn’t extend far enough back for James to be strictly hers. When she studies him from across the room, eyes sharp, like she knows there’s a lot he’s not telling her but knows there are reasons for it too, maybe even halfway decent ones, and there’s not enough of Audrey left in her to push him until he caves, her need for answers less insatiable, less all-consuming.
In a way, it’s better.
(In a way, it’s much, much worse.)
“So, I’m thinking of going apartment hunting on Saturday,” Paige says, voice full of cautious optimism, and the better part of a bottle of wine still left sitting on his coffee table, closer to her side than his. “You wouldn’t, I don’t know, wanna come stare down some landlords for me? Make sure I don’t accidentally end up in the bad part of town?”
He quirks an eyebrow at her. “We have a bad part of town?”
She smiles, the start of a joke that winds up caught between her teeth, something she thinks better of, but the curve of her mouth holds. It’s been a good night, more laughter than awkwardness, and it’s left her with her hands folded over a pile of decoupaged scrapbooks and photo albums she’d hauled out from under his couch, mementos he’d found while cleaning out the Chief’s house after he died, old photos his mother had from when he was a child, things he’d never gotten around to showing Audrey, never found the time to. She’d traced her fingers over the covers, told him she used to be an art teacher, or at least she thinks she did, confidence wavering before she digs her heels in, that resolve that what she believes is her reality filtering in.
It’s been a good night - something that’s far from guaranteed with them, landmines never more than a breath away on all sides - and she’s just as wary of ruining it as he is. Her eyes flick downwards, mouth twisting when he doesn’t do more than crack wise, disappointment seeping in even as she asks, “Is that a no?”
“Not a no,” he says, quietly, and the way her eyes light on his - Nathan doesn’t love her, not in the way he loved Audrey, but when she looks at him like that, bright and hopeful, it almost doesn’t even matter, and he hates himself for it. Hates that he’s known Paige for a month and he’s still looking for Audrey in every smile and furrow of her brow, wonders if he’ll spend the rest of his life doing the same if he hasn’t managed to kick the habit by now. It just makes him that much more determined to push through, to seek her out, to force himself to confront the reality that this isn’t Audrey.
Audrey is lost to him.
Paige isn’t.
He may not love her, may not want her the same, but he’s starting to care for this woman who’s intent on slowly worming her way into his life, who understands that there are some things he can’t talk about yet and trusts his judgment when she has little reason to. Nathan’s never exactly had a lot of friends to call his own but he thinks she might be one. He thinks maybe he needs that.
Maybe they both do.
“Could do that,” he tells her, some measure of certainty creeping into his voice, the set of his shoulders, scared shitless but sure, “or you could just stay here.”
“Here?”
“Yup.”
“Here...as in...here?”
“Yup,” he says, again, but he’s smiling this time.
“That’s - ” her mouth works soundlessly, before the rest of her words trip their way out, “I mean, that’s really, really - you remember I have a kid, right?”
Her son is asleep in the newly purchased foldout crib that took up residence in his spare bedroom almost a week ago. It had seemed, at the time, practical, just like it had seemed practical to start falling into his own bed instead of pulling the throw off the back of the couch at midnight and leaving it at a tangled up mess for her to judge his failings by, just like it had seemed practical to take down the post-it reminders littered around his house warning him not to forget his jacket if the mercury’s dipped below fifty and not to stick his hands in the oven without mitts, leftovers of a life he once lived scrawled in her handwriting.
Never mind that it’s his son too, easy as it is sometimes to let that slip his mind, to let himself slip into the lie he lets her believe, that maybe she lets herself believe too. He still feels roughly as responsible as he thinks he would if she knew. Playing house makes a twisted kind of sense; it’s the closest he’s able to get to the life he thinks some version of himself wanted and it’s still half-hollow.
“Think we can manage,” he tells her, wryly.
“You’re sure about this? This isn’t just because you feel - ”
“Obligated?”
“Yeah,” she exhales.
“I’m sure.”
It’s not what she asked, as much an admission as a denial, but she takes it in stride, like she figured as much and she’ll take self-awareness if nothing else. “Well. Alright then. I guess we’re roomies.”
“Guess so.”
“On one condition though,” she says, arms coming up to wrap around herself, “you’ve got to do something about the draft in here.”
He frowns.
Paige says it’s like moving into tree shade on a sunny day, like the temperature in the room just drops twenty degrees from one foot to the next, no warning at all.
“How long have you - ”
“Wait, you’re saying you don’t feel that,” she says, right over top of him, making a grab for his arm and yanking him into place where she just was, none of her usual regard for personal space. He can feel the warmth of her at his back through three layers of clothing between them, can feel the vice grip she has on his forearm and the floor solid underneath the soles of his shoes, but there’s no mysterious current of cold air, not even the slightest hint of a breeze.
All the windows are closed, the closest one not even in the vicinity of them, and he knows with absolute certainty that there’s no way in hell there’s a draft in here because his brand new sense of feeling came with bonus temperature sensitivity. Going from the enveloping steam of his shower to the cool tile of his bathroom floor feels like plunging his feet into ice. He would’ve noticed a draft.
And yet.
“You seriously don’t feel it?” she asks, grip going lax, and it’s all he can do not to let the laughter bubble up and over.
“You can’t see him?” Dwight had asked, staring out at a patch of thin air and dried out weeds like it held all the answers. “Why can’t he see you?”
The ‘draft’ seems to spread around the house, after that.
Paige is padding around the kitchen one morning, searching his cabinets for spare creamer, and ends up shattering his third favorite mug on the hardwood floor because something made the air along her right arm turn ice-cold. It felt like someone was trying to grab hold of her, she tells him, sitting on the closed lid of the toilet while he slaps a bandage on the spot where ceramic sliced her skin. She wiggles her toes experimentally, skin pink from getting splashed by scalding hot coffee, and he counts nine, swallowing a question about what happened to the other one in her reality.
“No one died here, right?” she asks.
Nathan frowns. “I don’t think so.”
“You don’t think so?”
“Haven,” he says, without explanation, shrugging as he buries the first aid kit in the back corner of the cabinet, it’s new home now that he’s not accidentally injuring himself on a regular basis. He doesn’t tell her about his own suspicions but he finds her in his office after four accessing housing records using his credentials, insisting she got off work helping out at the local elementary school early and thought she’d double check.
It happens a half dozen more times, thankfully without further injury, although the shriek coming from the bathroom one night has him thinking otherwise until Paige emerges, deathly unamused, her towel wrapped tight around her and hair hanging damp at her shoulders. “Your ghost is a perv,” she says, into the empty bathroom, before disappearing into the spare bedroom she’s claimed as hers. He feels a deep sense of regret emanating from that bathroom for the rest of the night and feels his own grip on sanity start to slip, weak as it might already be.
He tracks Gloria down a few days later.
“Drug overdose,” she explains, over top of an open chest cavity, deducing what’s got him hesitating two steps in the door in seconds flat. It’s been a long while since he’s seen a body on her table, and it makes something in his gut twist unpleasantly, even with the reassurance. “I’d call it a nice little dose of small town normalcy but - ” she smiles, nothing pleasant about that either, “well.”
The body of the boy on her table looks no older than seventeen, narrow shoulders and unlined features, and there’s nothing normal about that, at least there shouldn’t be. Here, though, in a town that’s been destroyed and rebuilt and destroyed again, they just call it aftermath.
“So,” she snaps off her gloves, “this about our girl?”
He lets her lead him away from the body, lets her shuffle through a stack of paperwork that clearly has nothing at all to do with her current task but for the way it positions him with his back to the table, grateful for the reprieve. Gloria acts harder than she is, but she’s picked up the slack for him with Paige when he couldn’t handle it and he knows she tried with Duke when the rest of them were failing, knows she made herself watch him die when she could’ve spared herself the image if not the sound. She cares more than she wants people to know.
Her and Duke really were a lot more alike than anyone knew.
Nathan hedges. “Not quite.”
Gloria abandons the pretense of paperwork to squint at him, evaluative and searching and all the things he doesn’t want. It took a lot to make himself come here and have this conversation. He’d been a whole lot less sober when he’d had it with Dwight, and Paige - to Paige, this is just another mystery for her to solve, evident in the questions she asks when she thinks he isn’t around, things like did you live here before? and what happened to you? and are you trying to find someone you left behind, is that why you can’t move on?, things that make his blood go cold with fear that she’s not wrong, with something close to hope for the same. He’s clear-eyed now, though, and Gloria knows the score, has known him since he was a kid chasing his father’s heels around the station, and that makes this harder, hard enough that he doesn’t quite manage to spit it out before she’s shaking her head at him. “You’re really no kind of subtle, kid.”
“Sorry?”
“You have a ghost problem,” she summarizes, rather succinctly, “and now you wanna know if I have a ghost problem or if you’re just - ” she makes a face “special.”
He frowns. “How’d you - ?”
“Oh, you know, there’s still some Audrey left in her somewhere so she’s been poking around, asking all sorts of fun questions about why there might be someone haunting your house, trying to figure out whether you’re lying to her about anything you shouldn’t be.” He must go a few shades paler than normal because she waves him off. “That’s between you and her, but if I were you I’d spill the beans on this one sooner rather than later. For everyone’s sake. Girl’s like a dog with a bone about this, and she wouldn’t thank you for keeping it from her.”
“I know,” he says, and whatever excuse is supposed to come after that, whatever comment about how this is for her own good, doesn’t make it past the grit of his teeth because it’s not and Gloria’s right. It’s not even particularly relevant which her she’s referring to. He’s been outright lying to Paige for more than a week, shrugging off her point blank inquiries about whether he has any idea what might be lurking in the corners of his home, and there’s a line being crossed there, a difference between keeping quiet on answers to questions she simply hasn’t thought to ask yet and what he’s doing now. Audrey’d have his neck for it, for burying Duke’s memory, for keeping him from this new version of her, but that doesn’t make the exposition come any easier.
Gloria harrumphs softly at him but it sounds far less judgmental than it could and she doesn’t push the issue further, instead looping back around to the original topic. “Well. Much as I’d like to say otherwise, Duke hasn’t been in to see ol’ Gloria yet. Heard he’s part of the reason Lizzie’s still running around though. If she’s Tinkerbell, I’m not sure I wanna know what that makes Dwight.”
“Tinkerbell?”
“Yeah. Clap if you believe in fairies or resurrecting the dead and - poof.” Nathan stares, blankly, no less confused. Dwight hadn’t mentioned any of this, but then Dwight’s developed this habit of talking to him about Duke the way that Nathan talks to widows about their husbands - carefully and sparingly if he can help it. “It’s a shame those rules don’t seem to apply to him.”
“Wait, you’re saying he - what, he wished her into being?”
“Yup.”
“Because Duke...told him to?”
“Hey, I had that reaction too, but it sounds a whole hell of a lot less crazy now that the second coming of your girlfriend is off playing Ghost Hunters. If anyone can tell the difference between what’s real and what’s a whole lotta wishful thinking in this town, it’s usually her.”
He knows.
That’s what scares him.
When it was just him - he could tell himself it was guilt, the same guilt that lets him feel the rabbiting of a pulse against his forearm in that half-second between sleeping and waking, catching onto the tail end of a nightmare that’s been on instant replay for longer than even he knows is healthy. He’d put Duke’s appearance to Dwight down as a symptom of the Troubles, a theory only helped along by Dwight’s subsequent inability to see him in the lights the way Nathan could, but the Troubles are long gone now and Duke apparently - isn’t. Because there’s no question who’d be lurking around Nathan’s house, not to anyone who’s familiar with the lay of the land, not to anyone but Paige, and if he’s in the house then it stands to reason that what Nathan was seeing before wasn’t just the product of guilt and emotional exhaustion.
Which means Duke’s been here for months, occupying the same space as him, sight mostly unseen and without anything in the way of communication.
Stuck.
Paige shakes him awake in the night.
“All I can smell is saltwater,” she says, without preamble, rocking back on her knees on his bed at three in the morning like she belongs there, surreal in a way that he can’t quite process. He inhales deep, as if on command, gets a whiff of vanilla off her skin, honey from the tea she’s drinking, mug wrapped in her other hand, but the sharp sting of salt is absent. He frowns, makes to sit up to turn on the light next to the bed, and she sighs, unfolding her legs and leaning back against the headboard in a disappointed sort of huff.
Nathan went to bed in sweatpants and no shirt, winter thawing into spring, his nightmares sending him into a cold sweat more often than not, and he’s acutely aware of that fact with her this close. She isn’t. She hasn’t looked at him since he turned the light on and, as it is, she’s staring at the chipped edge of the old Haven PD mug she’s cradling, running her teeth over her bottom lip. Worried and deadly serious, enough that he forces himself to shake off the disconcerting sense of deja vu.
It doesn’t help either of them any.
“Saltwater?” he asks, dumbly, still a little sleep-slow, and she nods once. He doesn’t live close enough to the ocean for that, but he thinks she’s probably aware or else she wouldn’t have woken him. She never has before. “What happened?”
“I woke up and I couldn’t breathe,” she recounts, quietly, “like I was - I don’t know, like I was drowning or something, like I was being held down. I thought maybe - whatever lives here, it’s never touched me before, but it keeps trying to, and I thought for a second maybe - ” something inside of him goes cold at that, revolting against the idea, his mouth very nearly getting ahead of him before the far off look in her eyes clears and she shakes her head again, “but then it just - lifted and now all I can smell is saltwater, and it’s not like when the breeze comes off the water, it’s like it’s inside me somehow.” She draws her knees towards her chest, curling in around herself tighter. “I don’t know what’s happening to me. Did I drown in a past life? Is that - am I remembering?”
“No,” he tells her, only to realize that isn’t entirely true. “Last time, the first night you were in Haven, you got blown off the docks in a freak storm. Lost consciousness when you hit the water.”
“Someone fished me out?”
“Yeah.”
He doesn’t elaborate and, after a while, a look of sudden understanding that’s entirely too Audrey-like to be comforting crosses her features. “Duke.”
“Yeah,” he admits.
Nathan’s voice scratches rough and it takes a few beats to summon the nerve to look at her, to gauge a reaction, but when he does she’s nodding, slow and repetitive, coming around to something, his insides preemptively twisting themselves into knots. “It’s always been Duke,” she says, finally, voice no longer catching on his name. “That’s who’s here, right? I mean, you keeping saying you don’t know, but if it’s Duke - ” she abandons her mug to the nightstand, scooting up the bed to pin him with her gaze, hands not quite reaching for his, though he thinks it might’ve been a close thing. “You don’t like to talk about him.”
“It’s not that,” he tells her, whisper quiet. “It’s not that I don’t like to, it just - ”
“Hurts?”
He closes his eyes.
Can’t answer past the lump in his throat.
She gives a soft little sigh, laden with compassion and the slightest hint of curiosity buried beneath, and then she’s reaching for him, curling her fingers around his, grounding him. There’s no jolt like there was with Audrey, the car crash of sensation that overwhelmed everything else instantaneously, but he finds he doesn’t miss it, doesn’t miss the desperate part of himself that always wanted to grab hold and never let go.
“You should tell me what happened,” she says, and it’s gentle but there’s no mistaking the order there, that he stop holding hostage things it’s well past time she knew. Every muscle in his body tenses, desire to run, and she smoothes her thumbs over the backs of his hands, sensing the hesitation, keeping him there. “He’s like an open wound for you, and that’s not - if he’s here, then you can’t just - ”
“I killed him,” he says, words shuddering out of him, eyes still shut tight. He waits for the weight of her hands to disappear but it holds steady, fingers curling in and in, her breath gone shallow, waiting for the rest to spill out, and it does. “We were out of time and out of options and I was trying to save you - her. Audrey. This town. He begged me to do it, said it was the only way, but he’d - ” he’d been trying to take himself out of the equation since he’d made plans to explode inside a thinny with Mara in tow, for even longer maybe, Nathan doesn’t say, swallowing it down with the uglier parts of this, things she really never does need to know - “it wasn’t the right thing to do. Should’ve never gone through with it.”
Paige is closer to him now, close enough that he can feel the warm-damp of her breath against his skin, her thumb swiping at his cheek. “It’s what he wanted,” she says, remarkably calm for someone who’s just discovered herself in bed with a murderer. “It was his choice, alright? Good or bad, right or wrong, it was his choice.”
“Wasn’t what he deserved,” he cracks.
“Since when does anyone get what they deserve?” she asks. “Okay, so, Duke didn't deserve to die. You don’t deserve to beat yourself up over this for the rest of your life. I - I damn well didn’t deserve to wake up one day and suddenly be forced to question whether what makes me me is real or just some illusion, some - overlay. It’s not about what we deserve. It’s about what we do with what we get. You’re still here. I’m still here. Duke is - maybe still here, somehow. That counts for something.”
In that moment, it’s Audrey speaking to him. Audrey’s bright-eyed determination to rally when it would be easier to give up. Audrey’s fingers that tangle in the cord around his throat, following the length of it down to the smooth metal whistle that rests against his chest, body-heat warm and heavier than it has any right to be. It’s Audrey, and then it’s not, her eyes losing some of their fierceness, her hand pulling back to rest over his once more.
Cracks.
There are always cracks.
He stares at her in wonder.
“I don’t smell it anymore,” she says, softly, her own eyes slipping closed on an inhale, as though it’s just registered. “The saltwater. It’s gone now.”
Nathan sits up a little straighter. “What - what does that mean?”
She frowns. “I don’t know.”
They don’t have to wait long to find out what it doesn’t mean.
Paige spends the better part of the early evening making lesson plans, his laptop and her binders spread out across his coffee table, humming along to the record player. She tells him she’s heard of survivors of trauma using art as a coping skill, as a way to express themselves, thinks it might serve as a distraction for the kids if nothing else. He nods along, chops vegetables for dinner - because one cannot actually live off of takeout forever - and good-naturedly rolls his eyes at the pointed look she gives him, all of the questions she wants to ask about the pottery classes and the decoupage on the tip of her tongue, even though the answers she’ll get are less about trauma and more about fine motor control.
The knock at the door doesn’t immediately read as suspicious.
The part where Paige doesn’t manage more than a few steps before she’s stumbling backwards, breath hitching audibly - that has his hackles up. It’s surprise written on her face, not fear, and she considers a patch of empty space before she nods, putting her hands up, palms out, the universal sign for surrender and what seems an attempt at placation to an unseen force.
“Hey, Nathan,” she says, calmly, glancing between him and that same patch of empty space, raising an eyebrow as if asking whether he follows, whether she’s going to have to vocalize the finer points of what just happened with an unknown entity on the other side of the door - and that’s just it, isn’t it? Nathan remembers a half dozen instances of Duke tangling a hand in his shirtfront, pushing him clear of danger he either hadn’t noticed or didn’t care about, a more violent version of the same protection he’d offered Audrey, that Nathan knows he’d instinctively offer to anyone walking around in Audrey’s skin, habit and the same sense of obligation he’s tangled up in.
Nathan grabs his service weapon off the counter.
It turns out to be for naught.
Mitchell is on his doorstep, come with his tail between his legs as one of Dwight’s many errand boys now that Dwight’s inherited what’s left of the Guard, sleeves rolled up to reveal ink against skin in a mirror to Nathan’s own. Mitchell who came after Mara and then Audrey, with aims at killing both. Nathan squares his shoulders but leaves his weapon holstered, and what follows is a terse conversation about the latest rebuilding project down in the ruins of Trouble Alley - still functionally a ghost town even more than two months out from the end of the Troubles - and how Mitchell and his buddies have finally come around to volunteering their help. Able-bodied man power is something they’re always short on but Nathan isn’t in charge of delegating, and he thinks this is probably more of Dwight making a power play by sending him down here than anything else. Some kind of humiliation, to have him offer himself up like this. Nathan wonders what he did to deserve that and decides he doesn’t care. Says he’ll talk to the relevant parties, thanks him without meaning it, and sends him on his way.
Paige is still standing in the middle of the living room, hands down, arms hanging loose by her sides, but there’s a rigidity to her spine, the set of her shoulders, that’s wholly unnatural. No sudden movements, less like she’s on the other side of a loaded gun but, instead, a scared animal.
“It’s fine, Duke,” he snaps, frustration with the situation, with finding himself on the outside of it again, bleeding through. It’s only the second time he’s ever addressed him directly but this time Nathan knows not to wait for a response that won’t be forthcoming. Duke is lost to him, in some cruel, karmic twist of fate, but he isn’t lost to Paige and it stings, stings, stings.
Stings less, and then more, when she hisses out a breath between her teeth as he turns his back, relief and confusion mingling in the sound, in the slow way she says his name a beat later. The tension’s gone out of her again, and he gives her a questioning look, aware that something’s shifted but not clear yet on what. “I think,” she starts, a little breathless, brow knitting together in concentration, that look that says she’s figuring out the rules on the fly, just like always; his stomach turns over, suddenly nervous. “I think he can hear you.”
He beats himself up over it, later.
For not knowing, for taking so long to figure it out. It’s been months. He doesn’t know how long Duke’s been lingering here, at what point he went from a faint silhouette on a neighboring street corner to an undetectable presence haunting the hallways of Nathan’s home, unable to communicate but apparently able to understand, to react, but Nathan feels like he should’ve picked up on it sooner.
Then again, how would he?
Absent Paige, absent whatever connection exists between them, allows him to interact with her in ways he hasn’t demonstrably been able to with anyone else, Nathan might’ve never known at all. He doesn’t know what to do with that. He doesn’t know what to do with the idea that Duke’s potentially been privy to every story he’s been edited out of, every time Nathan’s swallowed his name and his better judgment in favor of playing dumb, all of it steeped in betrayal, thick and choking.
Paige drags Dwight into this before the week is out.
Nathan’s never gone as far as telling her about Dwight’s experience with Duke’s ghost, hadn’t figured on it being relevant given that the Troubles were still active, given that he’d already tested that theory, but she must find out anyway - probably from Gloria, who sounded closer to spilling than not if he didn’t get his act together soon, and it makes him wonder if things would’ve gone differently had she been the ME when Audrey got here instead of Eleanor - and Nathan comes home to a bewildered Dwight standing in his living room, mid-interrogation.
“Sorry,” Dwight says, once they’ve established that, no, Dwight can’t see him and, no, Duke can’t seem to interact with him either, though Paige swears up and down he’s in the room. Nathan doesn’t know how she knows that, but he’s getting the impression that she knows when he’s in her space even if touch seems to be a complicated prospect from the way she’s described it. “Pretty sure I’m not the answer to ‘who you gonna call?’”
Something in Paige’s expression flickers.
Nathan keeps mistaking that for memory.
“It’s okay,” she says, arms crossed tight, battle face on. As sure as Nathan’s ever seen her. “I’ll figure it out. That’s - that’s apparently what I do.”
Haven doesn't quite make it three months without its first murder.
“Blunt force trauma to the head,” Gloria tells him, from the other side of an autopsy table, body covered in a white sheet, save for the right arm which she extracts. “Pretty extensive bruising on the forearm, radius is fractured. Looks like a defensive wound if I’ve ever seen one, like he pulled his arm up to block a blow from a - ”
“Baseball bat,” Nathan supplies. Gloria nods, like she’d figured as much. “Perp’s name is Charlie Everett. Lives alone, but neighbors’ said he’s been off for months. Paranoia, delusions, thought he was seeing his dead brother in town.” He bites down on the rest of it, minor details, witness reports saying Everett had come over the fence with no warning, the new widow’s insistence that there had been no bad blood, the traumatized seven-year old who’d been made to watch his father die. He doesn’t know why he’s telling her any of this. Maybe he’s still used to having a partner to talk things out with. Maybe aspects of this are just riding too close to his own personal narrative for comfort. He clears his throat. “Gotta send out for a psych consult this afternoon.”
Gloria huffs a laugh. “Good luck getting one of those ‘round here.”
Times like these, Nathan misses Claire, for all that he knew her, for all that she was Audrey’s friend and confidant rather than his. He almost says as much, but Gloria never met her, and the list of people who would understand is dwindling down, the dead joining the dead, and him left on the outside of it, always the survivor for all that he’s tried not to be. He doesn’t want to know what it’s going to be like five years down the road, doesn’t want to think about the same being true for Duke, for Audrey.
He stops for gas on the way home.
It’s almost eight by the time he palms his wallet and goes inside to pay, a longer shift than he’s worked in a while, the sun long since gone down in the sky. He’s more tired than he wants to admit, less aware of his surroundings than he’s trained to be, and while part of him registers the dingy brown van parked the next pump over, rocker panels rusted to hell along one side, it doesn’t click until Seth Byrne is clapping him on the shoulder.
“If it isn’t Dudley Do-Right in the thankfully still-corporeal flesh,” Seth jokes, dryly. “No thanks to me, of course. Hey, listen, you wouldn’t happen to know where Duke is, would you? We have some unfinished business vis-a-vis him ditching me in North Carolina to come back here and save you people from some crazy Croatoan dude. Which - ” Seth glances around, evaluative, “I guess that worked out.”
Nathan blinks. “Duke?”
“Yeah,” Seth says, before unease slips in. “Wait, you guys didn’t forget him too, right? Oh, man, he said he was going back here, I didn’t even think about if he - ”
“He did,” Nathan says, though that’s about all he can manage, his brain overloaded between the rush of information about what Duke was up to in the weeks he was gone - that he might’ve been headed back on his own, from the sounds of it, before Nathan went so far as to send a letter from almost thirty years in the past - and the sudden, painfully delayed realization that he’s standing there talking to a guy who created an aether detector and has a knack for communicating with ghosts.
A guy who helped bring him back when he was a ghost.
Months of this and he never even -
“You okay, buddy? You’re looking a little green,” Seth tells him, looking torn between poking at him and taking a few steps back in case Nathan throws up on his shoes; he opts for neither, hovering, waiting on an answer so he can figure out how to play this, and Nathan is -
Not okay.
But for the first time, he thinks there’s a chance he might get there.
fin.