TITLE: Comfortably Numb
AUTHOR: roseveare
RATING: NC17
LENGTH: 32,000 words approx
SUMMARY: Immunity to pain can only protect you so far. Audrey/Nathan/Duke.
WARNINGS: Body horror, contagion/infection.
NOTES: Spook_me ficathon, prompt: plant. Also challenge to self to write OT3 and not chicken out on the 'threesome' part. Set after 2.3 Love Machine, but not overly canon compliant. I apologize unreservedly for any science that was harmed in the making of this fic.
THANKS: To Kattahj for beta-reading!
DISCLAIMER: Not mine, no profit, yadda, yadda, yadda.

Comfortably Numb

The case first reached their attention because Dr Lucassi from the Freddie was picking up some shifts at Camden Hospital, and called them. "I think I've got one of yours," he told Audrey down the phone, distorting his voice into an almost comedic hiss. "At least, rumour has it that you do the 'weird' ones. Can you get up here? I'm not sure how much conventional medicine can do for him."

She pried Nathan out of a meeting she'd been planning to find an excuse to extricate him from anyway, and he drove the two of them up to Camden the same morning. He was still a bit surly, getting to grips with his new duties and the absence of the old chief, and really the last thing he needed was to be stuck listening to the gripes and expectations of the town's notables for the third time that week.

After what had happened to Audrey II, they were probably a pair. She'd planned to talk to him on the drive up, but he put on one of his defensive silences and she fast realised she lacked the energy to assault that particular wall, especially when she didn't really feel like talking either.

Lucassi was waiting furtively to ambush them in the lobby. Audrey had to wonder how long he'd been there, since the drive up hadn't been short and the ETA she'd given him had been vague. "You're here! Come with me." He clutched both their arms and half-towed them to an isolated wing of the hospital, up several stairs to a corridor that looked empty and decrepit, and to a room that had a window of reinforced glass onto a large ward occupied by only one man. Tied down to a bed, that man screamed and writhed around in the worst throes of madness Audrey had ever seen.

"There's nothing I can do that helps," Lucassi said. "His name's Raymond Flaxton. He came in like this earlier today, and only seems to get worse. I've already tried giving him so many sedatives I'm afraid any more would endanger his life. Although if this continues, he'll eventually die of exhaustion."

Audrey understood why he hadn't felt compelled to linger and watch the patient. There was something about the way the man moved, the contortions of his face and body, like the worst kinds of horrors and agonies plagued him. It sent a chill through her to watch it long-distance through the window, let alone up close in a monitor screen Lucassi had set up at one of the desks. Whatever was wrong with this man...

"What's on his face?" Nathan asked, breaking his silence of about the last hour, as he squinted into the screen. Honestly, after their drive up it almost shocked her to have proof he still actually could speak.

"And that is the question." Lucassi's eyebrows lifted in irony. He nodded to a tray over on a lab bench. "I did manage to extricate one, but it seemed to cause so much distress I'm not sure I can justify a repeat. Especially when anaesthetic has no more effect than tranquilizers. I sent samples for urgent testing. I'm waiting for the results, but even urgent tests in this place..." He grimaced. "I might have to purloin the equipment to do it myself... probably safer, in fact."

Audrey moved across the lab to stare at the dissected green pieces on the tray, aware of Nathan looming over her shoulder.

"It looks like a plant," Nathan said, unimpressed.

"Yes." Lucassi's intake of breath hissed in the brief silence around his words. "Yes, it does."

"He has these on him?" Audrey asked. She tentatively turned the green strand over with a metal implement picked up from the tray. It was small, only an inch or so long, and very thin, but had a couple of rougher textured, red-smeared areas, where it had presumably anchored into flesh. A few smaller tendrils sprung off from it, curled and even finer. She told herself it was just the way she'd flipped it and her own imagination that made it seem like it had moved. "Growing on him?"

Lucassi winced. "On him. In him. From him?" He echoed their dual horrified looks in sympathy and added, "It's hard to get him to stay still long enough to examine, but I did manage to take some skin scrapings, and a deeper punch biopsy." He mimed a quick stab like a swashbuckler lunging with a sword. "The filaments are concentrated towards nerve clusters. I shudder to imagine what they're doing to the brain to cause this... mania."

"Poor guy." Audrey reached out and touched the screen. "Do you think if he's Troubled, I could do something? Pull those things out, or...?" She looked at Nathan. Lucassi, who didn't know about the mystery of her immunity, just looked blank.

"Troubles don't affect Parker," Nathan filled in, reducing a wealth of complications and questions to four words. He jerked his eyes to the monitored ward. "Couldn't harm him, right?"

Flustered, Lucassi waved them on toward the door. Or she thought he was waving them on, until he caught Nathan's arm. "No. Contamination precautions. If she's immune, she's immune, but the rest of us get to wait outside or don protective clothing."

That made sense. Audrey nodded, and left her partner standing stiffly next to the doctor.

She closed the door quickly and carefully, and brushed aside a plastic curtain upon a semi-darkened room. There were various strip-lights but only one of them was lit, illuminating the bed where the ward's sole occupant lay, writhing and restrained. She walked past all the empty, shadowed beds. The man's moans and thrashing didn't alter with her approach. It was like he was completely locked into himself, even though his eyes were intermittently open; like he had no idea she was there at all.

"Hey, Mr Flaxton," she ventured, and reached out carefully to try and still his thrashing form. Flaxton was a stockily-built man of perhaps sixty, with a thatch of greying hair. He looked exhausted. His eyes were red-rimmed. His moans, when he made sound at all, were ragged and painful, voice so chewed up by screaming he wasn't screaming any more, just opening his mouth and rasping air. He didn't react to her touch on his shoulders. The thin hospital gown he wore was damp, soaked by sweat and half hanging off him from his struggles. She had to use both hands to try get him to stay still. He thrashed and her nails accidentally raked through the green filaments growing out across his neck and up his jaw.

Just before they tore clear, she felt them almost seeming to squirm beneath her fingertips. Ugh, Audrey thought.

She didn't have chance to dwell on it. She'd intended to touch his skin, to try to remove the tendrils, anyway. But her slip nearly convulsed him up off the bed despite his restraints. A scream rose from his broken voice. She made a vain attempt to hold his head still, more carefully this time, to try and offer comfort, but it was obvious that whatever her Trouble-proof abilities were, she was not applying them in a useful fashion here. She let go and backed off. "Mr Flaxton... Ray. We'll find an answer, okay? We'll find some way to help."

Shaken by the encounter, she just remembered to bend and snatch up the fallen pieces from the floor before retreating until her back was swallowed by the curtain and then hit the door. She swung around, yanked the handle and dived out. "There's... apparently there's nothing I can do for him, either," she admitted with a gulp. "Not right now, anyway." She dropped the greenery into a waiting tray and Lucassi grabbed a bottle of some kind of cleaning gel and squeezed a generous amount out onto her hands before she could get any further.

She concluded, "We have to do something. We can't leave him like this."

***

It was all very well saying that, but there were no clues in the life of Raymond Flaxton, insurance salesman, as to why he should be afflicted in such a way, and Audrey couldn't talk it out with him while he was deaf to her words. In the end, they had to return to Haven and leave Flaxton in Lucassi's care, who still asserted the belief he could do nothing for him. It preyed on her until, the following day, something happened to make her stop worrying quite so much about Mr Flaxton.

Haven PD were called by a worried neighbour, who hadn't seen Ann Penson from across the street since the day before, and who had become concerned when Miss Penson missed a standing date for mid-morning coffee and cake and no answer could be raised at her door.

Audrey and Nathan couldn't raise an answer at her door, either, and broke in to find Miss Penson dead in her bathtub. She'd been drowned while in the throes of seizures, her body a tracery of those thin, green tendrils and her face locked, in death, in a contortion that barely seemed to have noticed the fact she was drowning.

Nathan looked across at Audrey and said, "Maybe it's not Ray Flaxton's Trouble, after all."

They carefully backed out of the bathroom and left the house without touching anything. They called for the coroner's van from outside on Miss Penson's meticulously maintained lawn. While they were waiting, Nathan called Lucassi at the big hospital in Camden. "About that guy you--" Audrey watched him pause. She couldn't make out the words in Lucassi's response, only that they came thick and fast and carried on for some time. Nathan's expression didn't really change much but his voice was bleak as he said, "Three of them. Right. Well, we've another, already dead... No, bathtub. Drowned." He listened again, making occasional noises, then put the phone away.

He looked at Audrey. "Lucassi got two more last night. This makes four. We need to find out whose Trouble is doing this, fast."

"And find out if the others had any contact with Flaxton, or if there's some other person who links them all."

"I'll get the ME to talk to Lucassi. Damn it." Nathan's expression soured in realisation. "If it's Daniels, he'll have the CDC down on us." Wright Daniels, one of the off-on stand-in MEs since Julia Carr had fled, didn't know about the Troubles, and wasn't prepared to listen to any hints or cautions that perhaps things other than normal might be involved in a situation. Nathan got his phone out again. "I'm cancelling the van. See if we can get Lucassi to arrange to move Ann Penson's body to the hospital morgue up in Camden."

"Another day, another cover-up," Audrey said wryly, and he acknowledged her with a sarcastic jump of his eyebrows. "Gotta love this town."

***

Back at the station, Lucassi had sent through what information he could lay his hands on regarding the other two victims. Both of them were from Haven, and the fact they'd showed up in Camden first was a result of Camden hospital having a 24-hour ER, and both their symptoms manifesting late last night. Pain, to begin with. The growths hadn't become visible until a few hours later, and by that time, neither of them were in any state to communicate with Lucassi or his colleagues anymore. One of them had crashed his car in the hospital lot and hadn't even reached the ER under his own steam.

By three o'clock, Lucassi was in the middle of his first autopsy, three hours' drive away. Audrey and Nathan had visited both their victims' houses, quizzed their neighbours and family, and were drawing a blank. The problem was that they couldn't speak to the victims, and even direct examination of the victims was nigh-impossible. They were less helpful, in fact, than if they had been corpses, all of them reduced to that absolutely unhelpful screaming incoherence that was going to be plaguing Audrey's nightmares again later.

"Flaxton gardens," Audrey said, as they walked back down the street to their car, her theories starting to get desperate. "Penson's garden was pretty impressive. Maybe that's the connection." She turned on her heel. "We should go back and take a closer look at Jimmy Herril's garden."

"Evil plants?" Nathan picked up, with a reluctant tone, his steps lagging behind her.

"Why not? We said it looked like a plant. Maybe it really is a plant! I always thought geraniums were pretty evil," she confided. "Failing that, maybe these people can't tell us anything, but we can still get their gardens to talk."

Nathan snorted. "I hate to break it to you, but all I saw through Herril's kitchen window was a cracked patio pavement and a bunch of weeds. I don't think green fingers are--"

A moment later, she realised he'd stopped, and turned back, wheedling, "Hey, we might as well look, right?" She paused, too. Nathan's narrowed eyes were focused in through the window of the house they were passing, the home of one of Herril's neighbours. "You're kidding."

Nathan shook his head. "I think we have another."

It wasn't easy to see details through the window and the half-closed drapes into the darkened room within, but it was possible to make out a figure staggering and reeling about. A head rose and presumably saw them, because the person disappeared and a moment later, they heard a thump on the other side of the front door. They ran up the garden path. Nathan tried the handle and Audrey figured they were both just as surprised when it opened. A woman with tight grey curls who wore a floral house-coat fell through it, her hands bent like claws, scratches all over her visible skin, and threw herself hysterically into Nathan's arms.

"Help me! I'm dying... Chief Wuornos, please, I can't stand it... Oh, God, help me! You've got to do something...!" The woman clutched for Nathan's gun, but couldn't get her hands around it, and he grabbed her wrists and held them clear. She convulsed in his grasp, wailing and screaming.

"Mrs Geraghty?" Nathan said incredulously.

"Shoot me!" the woman begged. "At least then... then it'll be over. Oh, God..."

Audrey hoped it at least afforded her some relief as she zapped Mrs Geraghty in the back with a taser. She stiffened and slumped. Nathan eased her down slowly.

"Ex-girlfriend?"

He gave her a look. "One of dad's Hot-Stove Meeting harpies." He took out a handkerchief and sighed as he wiped smears of blood from his hands. "We still don't know how this is contracted, right? It might need contact with the Troubled person."

Audrey shuddered. "I sure as hell hope so." She thought of the wrecks of the human beings they'd seen affected by this. Immunity was all fine and good, but sometimes, it would feel better if she could share it.

"Either way, I guess we're going to know pretty soon."

"Not that soon," Audrey corrected, unhappily. "It starts with pain. Just... keep a look out. The last thing we want is you walking around oblivious and infectious."

They hauled Mrs Geraghty into the back of the Bronco and returned to the station, where Nathan organised a door-to-door check of the area in search of further victims of the outbreak, with instructions for protective clothing to be worn by all officers. Then they loaded Mrs Geraghty into a marked police car with its back secured for prisoner transport and set off on the drive up to Camden.

By the time she woke up from her taser-enforced nap, the poor woman had already been too far gone to answer questions, and green lines, which had barely been visible before, were spreading over her face.

After Audrey put her head in her hands and tried to block her ears a half-hour into the drive, Nathan pulled over. His fingers teased her hair back over her shoulder and out of her eyes so he could pin her with his gaze.

"I'm sorry, it's just--" She shook her head. In the back of the car, Mrs Geraghty's screaming was growing hoarser, and perhaps a fraction quieter. No, it really didn't help.

"Taser her again," Nathan said.

"Nathan! You can't just keep electrocuting people. You know that--"

"She really, really wants to be tasered again." He jerked his head at the back compartment, everything in his voice and body language stiff and stony. "I'd want it." That comment was still a bit too pertinent at the moment, though she'd been scouring his visible skin and keeping a close eye on his behaviour, and hadn't yet seen any signs of the madness taking effect. But Audrey did indeed see his point. She heaved a breath and got out of the car; opened the back door and jabbed at the flailing, screaming woman with the taser. Silence fell, though her head continued to ring with the desperate cries.

It bought them minutes. They withstood another half-hour after that before stopping again for a rinse-and-repeat.

They were in their third guilty but oh-so-necessary spell of silence when Audrey spied a blemish on Nathan's outstretched hand, where it rested on the steering wheel next to her. It wasn't much of anything, really, to notice... If she hadn't been looking. A pinprick dot of green, growing out of a red scratch where Mrs Geraghty's bloody fingernails must have broken skin. "Oh no, Nathan..."

Audrey pointed her finger at it, not quite touching.

It had been about three hours. It seemed to her that was quicker than the rest. Perhaps because Mrs Geraghty had broken skin.

He looked down at it and his face closed up even more. "I don't feel anything," he said, then snorted wryly. "I mean, I don't feel... I feel fine."

It had taken about twelve hours for the effect to show up on the others, from what they'd been able to piece together, going by when each victim had last been seen healthy and when they'd been found. Was she looking at a matter of hours before she saw her partner degenerate into that? She could barely stand thinking it. It was bad enough watching strangers...

As if to twist the knife, Mrs Geraghty woke up and began to make small but increasing noises of distress once more in the back. Audrey leaned over and breathlessly told her, "Shut up."

"Now, Parker," Nathan chided, with a note of sarcasm. He stopped and skewed the car in to the side of the road. "Look--" The tough guy act was all very well, but on this occasion the mask was slipping. "At least I won't feel it. So... better me than anyone else at the station, right?"

No, not better! Audrey thought. Not feeling it did not make it okay, and she knew very well that he didn't even believe that. Nathan was all about control. She'd seen him go crazy when affected by a Trouble once before, and she couldn't imagine what it must be like for him to contemplate becoming like the victims they'd seen.

He shook his head brusquely at her silence. "It's not doing anything yet, so--"

"Get out of the car." Audrey needed to tone that down. She forced herself to get a grip. Calm. They didn't know everything about how this worked. They knew next to nothing, in fact. Now she had lots of incentive to figure it out quickly. Today. Now. More reasonably, she said, "One of the other guys crashed his car. Better if I'm the one driving, right?"

He looked as if he wasn't convinced, and probably would have preferred the distraction of being at the wheel. She'd have liked to let him keep it, but they couldn't take the risk.

They swapped over, and drove without speaking to each other the rest of the way to Camden Hospital. Mrs Geraghty thrashed and screamed in the back, but Audrey felt like she'd turned as numb as her partner, and the wretched woman's distress barely registered upon her at all.

***

Dr Lucassi's eyes flickered from the computer screen to Nathan and back. "Your medical history is fascinating." He had that look doctors got, the one that said science project. Nathan sighed and rolled his eyes, because right now, he was just hanging around waiting to go crazy, and that look was the last thing he needed. He stood stiffly while Lucassi attempted a coy smile and to make light of the matter. "I'm getting your paper files shipped over from Haven Medical Centre, but they said they might need more than one truck."

"You don't know the half of it," Parker jeered.

"Funny." Nathan shifted stiffly and the handcuffs clinked at his back. They were both trying -- in their own ways -- and he could see the strain in Parker's face and the deep shadows under Lucassi's eyes, so he couldn't let his own frustration take over. He hadn't gone mad yet. He wondered if the tension he felt was the first sign, but then he could see the four human beings now writhing on the beds in the ward the other side of the observation window, and how else was he supposed to feel while waiting for that to happen to him?

He'd argued that he should be in there; that he was endangering Lucassi, who right now was the only doctor in the know that they'd got. Parker wouldn't hear of it, though, and Lucassi was all fired up to make the most of having a still-coherent and cooperative patient. So he'd cuffed himself, dropped the key, and kicked it at Parker. She'd looked pretty pissed, but left things as they were. It was a moderate source of comfort to Nathan knowing they'd have a head start on restraining him if he started acting up like Mrs Geraghty, or thrashing like Flaxton.

"It's not a medical condition," Nathan said crossly, frowning at Lucassi's perusal of dense blocks of text and charts as he got to grips with 'idiopathic neuropathy'. "I think we all know that. I'm Troubled, and that file is -- next to worthless."

Lucassi made a noncommittal noise but turned away from the data. He detoured to peer at a few test tubes and Petri dishes he'd set up in a corner after his first round of samples, then approached Nathan with a fresh needle. Nathan backed off and jerked his head stubbornly to Parker. Lucassi was wearing gloves, but he didn't care. This thing was definitely passed by body fluids, they didn't know what else for certain, and if Lucassi fell victim, they were screwed.

"How do you feel now?" Lucassi asked, pausing six feet away and obediently handing the needle over to Parker with an encouraging nod.

"I don't feel anything. I thought we covered that." He got control of himself. Talking about his affliction never put him in the best of moods, even in better situations than this. He closed his eyes briefly. "All right. Mentally. I feel stressed. Who knows whether that's a symptom."

When he opened his eyes, Parker was drawing blood from his arm. She was wearing gloves, too -- to avoid any cross-contamination into the samples, Lucassi had advised. He hadn't felt her touch as she rolled up his sleeve. Her face was almost close enough to kiss. He did feel her breath on the skin of his neck and that light kiss of air and warmth, welling up out of the void, stunned him momentarily.

She gave him a silent, tight smile and took the blood back to Lucassi's test tubes.

They didn't speak much for the next ten minutes because Parker was engaged in unfamiliar tasks handling Nathan's bodily fluids and Lucassi was instructing her -- and probably because Nathan's own foul mood was projecting every bit his impression of a silent wall. He kept stealing glances into the room next door, the victims unchanged and unchanging, and kept consciously trying not to, because that really didn't help. Not least because he could see his own skin in the reflection of the glass, the alien traceries of growth starting to become visible across his face. It was getting worse. If he didn't look at the window, though -- well, Parker had pulled his sleeve down all the way again, and he couldn't see his hands. One bonus granted him by his own Trouble was that if he didn't see it, it was almost like it wasn't happening.

"You know," Parker said, stepping back from the tests and circling him. He watched her worriedly. She had a tone. "Mrs Geraghty was sort of rational and still able to talk when we found her. Just... not for long." She frowned. "It's been a lot longer than that now. And you look worse now -- sorry, Nathan -- than she did." She reached out to his face and her gloved hand did something. She pulled it back with a few green strands caught between her fingertips.

"I guess we have all the samples we want, now," Lucassi said, looking on with an annoyingly but-on-the-bright-side clip in his tone. As he amended his focus to Nathan's face, his expression grew serious and his eyes narrowed.

Nathan said defensively, "What?"

Lucassi shrugged. "The rest went even crazier whenever I've tried to remove any of the growths, but you... you really can't feel it, can you?"

Nathan rolled his eyes. Whatever else the doctor was getting at, he wasn't seeing it, but Audrey clearly did. Her face turned canny, then horrified. "Oh." Her eyes were drawn through the window and fixed there, on the writhing patients. "This... this isn't something these growths are doing to their minds. Not directly, anyway."

"Those poor bastards." Lucassi fell in at her side, movements and gaze echoing hers.

Parker turned sharply. "Nathan, you're going to be all right." She stalked toward him, determination on her face, wielding the handcuff keys like a threat. "Do not run away from me." She lunged and caught his arm. "You're going to be -- at least, for the moment you're going to be just fine."

Lucassi had paused, face warring between wonder and distinct unhappiness. "What's sending them mad, it's... just the pain," he said, even as Nathan was starting to see it. Parker wrested with his cuffs and he felt that, for a moment, as the skin of her wrist brushed against him, and Jesus--

It was a split second's contact, but it dropped him to his knees with a cry.

Parker gasped and jumped back. "Sorry. Sorry."

"Not your fault." He grit his teeth. He was numb again, but the memory of agony seemed to flood his entire body, even though she'd brought only one small patch of him very briefly to life. He forced his shaky legs to bear his weight and pried himself upright again. "That was -- Now we know."

He let her finish, releasing him without struggle, cowed by the memory of pain he was less adapted than anyone to handle.

Lucassi seemed to have lost capacity for words. He ran his hands over his face, blinking at his patients.

"You know I'm still contagious?" Nathan pressed, as Parker pocketed his handcuffs and the keys and stepped away.

"I'm convinced contact with bodily fluid or the filaments themselves is required," Lucassi offered, distractedly. "Or we'd have had a dozen personnel down with it by now, including myself. Maintain a reasonable distance from people and cover up."

Nathan flung his hands up in agitation. "And -- and I'm green." An exaggeration, but still. "I can't go wandering about like this in public. Parker!"

"Yeah?" she said, still a bit spacey, half her focus a million miles distant on the kind of agony that could turn a person into that. Nathan didn't have to wonder. Alright, lucky for him this time, but hell, they needed to solve this one soon. Every passing minute had to reduce the chances of the other victims ever being sane again. Parker came back to herself, frowned critically at him, and said, "Well, we'll see if we can do something about it."

***

Stepping out to walk across the parking lot in public view proved one of the more daunting experiences Nathan could remember. After Parker's confident pronouncement, he had envisaged her remedy involving more than her dashing out to buy a hoodie and a pair of gloves while he spent fifteen minutes in front of the mirror scraping off the visible tendrils from his face and neck.

Lucassi had seized the waste for further testing, but advised him that when he did this elsewhere, he should probably burn them. Charming.

"I should be in quarantine," Nathan had retorted thickly. But Lucassi just shrugged, and fine, they probably did need all bodies on this, and not to have to explain the sudden disappearance of the Chief of Police, either. "Alright. The next twelve hours. What else can I expect?"

"Their outer appearance seems to have stabilized more or less at what you see now." Lucassi zoomed in on a face with the monitor, spider-webbed with tendrils, contorted with agony. "If you can stand to keep pulling them out, it might be a good idea, because they also seem to be working... inwards. Infiltrating the nervous system, from what I can gather. None of the victims exactly stay still for scans. Come back in the morning and we can use you to find out more." He looked excited by the prospect. "You might start having problems moving, eventually, even if you don't feel the pain."

"Fantastic." And that had been when Parker walked in carrying the sort of outfit he hadn't worn since he was a student, and the day got even better.

Nobody particularly seemed to stare at him as they crossed the parking lot, though, and Parker submitted to his determination to drive them back. Which was comforting, he supposed -- his mental stability being sufficiently trusted to let him behind the wheel once more.

After about five minutes of silence, Parker prompted, "Bright ideas?"

Nathan felt like saying, You want me to think now? but was vaguely aware of having been moody before this turn of events, and none of this had exactly helped. "Gardening connection. Still worth exploring?"

They never had gone back to Jimmy Herril's garden. A little too much else to focus on, at that point.

Parker nodded slowly, and the day was wearing on, but she said suddenly, "Don't turn off back to Haven. Let's go to Flaxton's house." She dug out the case file, crawling over behind the seats to get to it, and found the address.

Nathan frowned. "Camden's not in our jurisdiction. We'd need to liaise with the Camden police force--"

"Don't worry. I can get us in."

In the circumstances, he decided to go with that. Flaxton's condition hadn't changed much in 24 hours, but they'd yet to find out what Nathan might have to look forward to after that. Eventually, he was certain that immunity to pain wasn't going to be enough. "All right."

"Okay, now you're worrying me," Parker joked, poking him in the shoulder.

He slid his eyes her way, momentarily taking them off the road. "If I was that much a stickler for rules, I think this partnership would have been doomed from the start."

Raymond Flaxton's house was reasonably upmarket and highly unremarkable. He had a sizeable garden with a couple of greenhouses. They walked the yard carefully, finding a depressing lack of mutant plants, before approaching the house, where Parker let them in through the back door.

Inside was just as unremarkable as the outside. A shopping bag was dumped on the table with Ryan's Garden Centre printed in green on the side. It contained a few wilting plants, unwatered and abandoned since Flaxton had taken sick. Nathan reached in to examine the contents more closely. Inside the leather gloves, his hands seemed all thumbs. He was used to having no tactile information of what he was trying to grip, but the thickness and texture were throwing out his carefully-honed compensations. The plants in the bag looked innocent enough. He grabbed the receipt firmly and stared at the date and time on it; held it out to Parker. "He was at the garden centre the evening before he got sick."

The opening hours were printed on the receipt. The place opened late, but it was miles outside town on the way back to Haven, and they had less than an hour to get over there. Nathan broke a few traffic laws heading back the other side of Camden.

They quizzed the employees with a picture of Flaxton. Did they remember him? Had anything in particular happened while he was visiting the garden centre? Had they experienced anything strange lately in general?

Jurisdictional issues or not, their badges got them a search of the place, which stretched a half-hour or so after closing hours. They found absolutely nothing. None of the employees had been off sick. No-one else had had any problems.

The last counter assistant to be asked remembered serving Flaxton. "Barely," he stressed, with a snort. "He spent all the time talking with a woman behind him in the queue. Hardly looked my way once, either of them. Too busy talking tomatoes." He shrugged at their blank faces and said, defensively, "This is just a day job. I don't understand people with these sorts of weird passions. Give me some football any day."

He couldn't give them much on the woman. Tall, brunette, professionally dressed, glasses... maybe glasses. She'd still been wearing an ID tag that looked official, forgotten on her shirt, but he couldn't remember the organisation or the name on it. The description couldn't be further from Ann Penson, at least allowing them to rule her out directly.

"At least we have some ideas what our Troubled person might look like," Nathan said as they finally left, releasing the relieved staff to close up store.

"Unless she's another victim we just haven't found yet." But the counter assistant hadn't noticed any body fluids being exchanged, although he'd been pretty amused by the question. Parker gave a grim smile. "If not... That guy has no idea how lucky he might be that she was paying no attention to him." She pulled a face. "Plenty of people come up here from Haven, right?"

Nathan shrugged. "It's bigger than the local one. So it began to spread at the garden centre, but our unknown woman brought it there," he reasoned. "Unless this is a Trouble triggered by... tomatoes?"

Parker laughed. "There has to be more to it than that. Then again, you heard the guy. People are obsessed by some funny things. And speaking of funny things, you're starting to look kinda weird again. I think we only got away with it in there because they'd turned off most of the overhead lighting to close for the night. We need to fix you."

They climbed into the car and she drew his hood back while he twisted the rear-view mirror around. Small pinpricks of green pigment and tiny explorative threads were breaking out again across his face. he brushed them off, scraping his hands over the skin roughly. Parker tried to catch them all in a bag, to burn later. He took his gloves off. His hands were worse, and maybe those things were as responsible for his increased clumsiness as the gloves. He ran his bare hands through his hair, scraping with his fingernails, and displaced more tendrils, hidden in his scalp. When he figured he was done he leaned forward, pressed his forehead into the steering wheel and swore.

"I would hate this," Parker said, and from her tone it was apparently an attempt at comfort. He turned his head, still rested on the wheel, and looked at her. She gave him a tentative smile, but her disgusted face as she sealed the bag full of bits was also not a comfort.

"At least I don't have to feel it." He repeated it to remind himself, as he wrenched himself up and turned the key in the engine. He was lucky. Lucky.

"Yeah, but not feeling it doesn't really help when you don't know what you might be... turning into."

"I ever tell you how great you are at these pep-talks, Parker?"

"Sorry." A pause, in which she let him pull away from the garden centre and get them on the road back to Haven. It was late -- hours past time for either of them to clock out already, and when they got back to Haven it would be time to sleep. "You know you're coming home with me, tonight?" she said, awkwardly.

He shot her a blank stare before dragging his eyes back to the road and an orange pickup with a death-wish.

"Well, it's my call you're out and about at all." She was trying hard to sound jovial. "If you're gonna start with the crazy, I need to be on hand to shut it down. My responsibility, right? I'm still the only one we know can't get infected by this."

"Fine." It was a load off Nathan's mind. He could crash on Parker's couch. He didn't expect to sleep too soundly, but it wasn't like any physical discomfort ever bothered him anyway.

He flicked the radio on to fill the silence and she tipped her head and scrunched her lips cutely at him as country music jangled out. Whether it was the choice of tunes or something else on her mind, he couldn't tell.

***

They stopped at the police station only to swap the police car for Nathan's truck before driving on to the Gull. One drawback he hadn't thought of about staying at Audrey's place ambushed them as they were getting out of the car. Duke strolled over looking loud and merry, holding a crate of wine with both hands. "Hey." He grinned. "Officers Wuornos and Parker, come to live it up at the best party in town?" His expression changed as he squinted at Nathan. "What're you--?"

Nathan turned his back and mentally begged Parker to sort it out.

"It's a Trouble, Duke," she said, with a bit more bald honesty than Nathan would have liked, although on the other hand-- Yeah, maybe it was for the best if Duke knew he was spending the night at Parker's place because of this. Fraternization was something Duke would get no end of mileage out of, even if it wasn't true.

"What?" An incredulous laugh in Duke's voice. "Nathan's been turned back into a student?"

"Not... quite." Parker hesitated.

Damn it. Nathan turned around and, with a quick check for anyone else in the vicinity, tugged down his hood, just for a moment, then replaced it quickly. He had no doubt his face was mottled all over with those growths again, after the interval in the car. It was dark now, so chances of other people spotting them were reduced, so long as he didn't venture too near anyone.

Duke could evidently see enough in the light spilling over from the terrace. He put down the crate of wine with a slam, almost dropping it. "What the hell?"

"Don't touch me," Nathan warned.

"He's serious. This thing's communicable. We don't know how to stop it. Yet."

"He's contagious?" Parker's warning caused Duke to jab a finger towards Nathan and back off in alarm.

"Duke," she snapped.

Nathan growled, "We're also trying to keep this thing quiet."

"Right, but -- contagious. And walking around," Duke emphasized, though he lowered his voice to something like a stage whisper.

Nathan scowled at him and shrugged. It was his own argument on the other man's lips, but like hell was he giving Duke the satisfaction of admitting that.

"So far as we know," Parker drawled, "it's transferred through body fluids. So unless you feel like swapping any of those with Nathan anytime soon... you're probably safe." She looked between them and quirked her eyebrow.

Duke's face reddened. "Oooo-kay," he said slowly, and bent down to pick up his crate. With it back in his hands, raised before him like a shield, Duke took a cautious step backward. Then his face scrunched in sudden thought and he demanded, "How the hell did Nathan get it, then?"

"Blood, from a victim," Nathan hissed, annoyed. "Parker!"

She held her hands up, evading responsibility. "Nathan's staying with me tonight so we can keep an eye on his condition."

"Oh." Duke looked a fraction sour. "His 'condition', huh?"

"Turning into a plant, Duke," Nathan said curtly.

"Right. You both enjoy that." Holding up his crate, Duke backed off toward the lights and sounds spilling out from the bar and the tables on the decking. "Let me know when I should get someone in to fumigate." He barged through the door shoulder-first and disappeared.

Nathan and Audrey looked at each other. Parker looked cross. "Well, that's one avenue of help to scratch off the list."

"Duke?"

"Time limit here! We need all the backup we can get. He's our friend, he's in the know about the Troubles... I don't really need to go through all this again, do I? Besides, I thought you were both getting along better, lately."

Nathan shook his head, dismissing it. It was late. It was dark. Duke's bar was noisy, and was probably going to keep him up. "I need sleep."

She led the way.

***

Parker heated up a few microwave meals and afterwards they spent a session in the bathroom picking off growths. Nathan sent her out when they got as far as his waistline, but it was still embarrassing. Not just his naked body, but his naked body... infected. She shouldn't have to look at that. He didn't want to look at that. He already knew he was lucky he couldn't feel what was happening, but at the same time, the void of his body created a different anxiety. This could be doing anything inside him, and he wouldn't know.

Okay, perhaps that was also lucky: did he really want to know?

He couldn't take consolation that he was still all right in himself because his anxiety levels were probably off the charts.

In the bathroom, he worked methodically and tried not to think about what he was doing, but he still winced as he yanked the tendrils clear of his groin and anal area, despite his incapacity to feel the discomfort. God damn it. He glowered into the mirror and barely managed to hold back any force from the fist he ploughed into the wall. He didn't want Parker to hear him lose control.

He showered, and it made no difference to how utterly unclean he felt. By the time he'd finished, the faintest first pinprick discolouration of the growths was already returning.

Parker tapped on the door and passed through to him a thankfully unisex and baggy dressing gown. He wondered if he was going to have to burn his clothes, later. For the moment, he just threw them in the tub with a mental note to apologize to Parker for the mess.

"All right," he said through the door before he ventured out. Parker was his partner, and they'd been through a lot together, but that didn't mean infringing on her like this was in any way okay.

She smiled and gave him a bit too candid a once-over. "Not the circumstances I was thinking I'd ever see you wear that spare dressing gown, Wuornos," she quipped, and he choked on any possible reply and told himself she couldn't have meant that as anything other than a joke to keep his spirits up.

"Anyway," she ventured awkwardly after several seconds of silence, "I fixed something up. Come on." She grabbed the big sleeve of the dressing gown and led him -- to the bed, he realised, with dawning comprehension. They got as far as the bead curtain at its end before Nathan's brain kicked in and he stopped and tugged back.

"Couch," he said, trying not to splutter.

"That's no good." She gestured with clear impatience. "I want to be right here if anything happens to you. The bed is big enough, and you're sick, and I'm not going to put you on the couch even if you can't feel yourself wrecking your back. It's not like we're going to do anything. Right now, my touch is about the only thing that can hurt you. That's why I did this: look, there'll be a sheet between us." She pulled back the comforter to show him that her side of the bed was made up with an extra folded-over sheet to act like a wall between them.

"Nathan," she said with abrupt fierceness, "I might have to ask you to explain that face. We're both responsible adults, after all, and it's not like it'd be the worst thing in the world if either of us did try any funny business." She narrowed her eyes at him and waited.

Nathan wanted to stomp off back to the sofa. He didn't begin to know how to deal with this. Especially not the implications of that last, coming right now, when he couldn't do anything about it. He tried hard not to think of Audrey that way. He tried very hard, considering that Parker was in fact the one woman he might be able to pursue anything like a regular physical relationship with. "Fine," he groaned reluctantly. He was definitely getting no sleep tonight.

After finishing a last few preparations for bed, they crawled in on either side, Nathan's movements laden with impending doom. He tried to arrange himself with his back to her, but Parker turned deliberately to face him, pushed her hand through the barrier between them, distorting the sheet, and the blunt shapes of her fingers touched his arm, pulling him back around.

Her grin was mischievous, though perhaps a fraction forced. "Think of it like a sleepover. Pity we don't have any rocky road ice cream and you don't have enough hair to braid, hey, Wuornos?"

"Parker," he started, and stopped, because he had no idea what he'd been going to say.

She rolled her eyes. "We're partners, right? We work together all day. We've saved each others lives a time or two. We can sleep platonically side-by-side in the same bed." She screwed up her face. "At least... humour me. You can do that much? I'm worried about you. If this starts having more of an effect... Ann Penson died because she was alone. Jimmy Herril could have. This way you're right here, and I'll know the instant you're in any trouble."

"I'm sorry," he said. She was right. He was probably being ridiculous. It was just it had been a while since he'd been this close to anyone, and right now he felt disgusting. She didn't deserve to have to do this. "You know me. This is... oversharing."

Parker snorted. "Just let me take care of you right now." She squeezed his arm through the sheet. He watched it, not feeling it. "Goodnight, Nathan."

"'Night, Parker."

She murmured, as she closed her eyes, "Don't worry, we'll... figure it all out tomorrow."

It took a while, courtesy of the opportunity to watch her face uninterrupted and unobserved, plus expected noise from the bar, plus all the thoughts spiralling around in his head -- although thanks to Parker those were at least no longer primarily about turning into a Troubled alien plant -- but he did sleep.

When he woke up, he didn't know what the hell his numb, unconscious reflexes had been thinking, because even though he couldn't feel it, he'd rolled himself close up to her smaller body, still cocooned in the sheet, and there was nothing but that thin membrane of cloth between them now.

He cautiously tried to edge free without waking her, until the point he realised her eyes were already open and watching him.

***

The morning was grey and drizzle-laden, and Duke Crocker hadn't been intending to be out so early, but he was restless, so went over to the Gull and started preparations for the day, before any of his staff had gotten there. As he slunk about, switching things on, taking things out, arranging and re-arranging, he was excessively conscious of the space above his head. Which was quiet as yet, with no noises of two pairs of early-morning feet padding across the floor.

Distracted? Yeah, a bit. He was distracted, and he'd been distracted, if he was to be honest about it, for most of the night. Nathan and Audrey had found hell of a thing to spring on a guy after a few drinks at the end of a long day, and he had an awful feeling he'd offended -- well, Audrey. Offending Nathan went without saying. That he breathed air was a constant source of offence to Nathan.

Eventually, he found himself unable to ignore the feeling, and with the heavy apprehension of a bad idea, nonetheless got creative. As he worked, he began to hear awakening noises overhead. Fifteen minutes later, he got a tray and carried it outside and up the wooden steps to the apartment above.

Audrey opened the door brusquely when he knocked on it. She looked hassled, and her expression had to pull a quick switch when she saw the tray he'd balanced on the rail, overladen with sweet pancakes and waffles, a jug of orange juice and two cups of coffee. "Duke!" Her face brightened, then she squinted at him suspiciously. She was dressed in rumpled clothes from the previous day, and still had that pinched, just-awoken haziness in her gaze. "Couldn't control your curiosity, huh?"

He shrugged internally and went with it. "Is Nathan around?"

She pulled a face. "In the bathroom." She waved him through. As he walked past to set the tray on the table, Duke critically noted that it did not look like anyone had slept on the sofa. Behind the bead curtain, though, he could see both sides of the bed rumpled, with covers pulled back... Damn it.

He fussed with the tray a moment longer than necessary, taking the time to get control of his expression before turning. "So does Nathan hog the blankets even though he can't feel the cold? I bet he would."

Audrey blinked back at him, sitting down and yanking her fingers through her hair in an attempt to comb it into order. "I didn't sleep with Nathan." She followed his gaze to the bed, and lobbed a cushion at him irritably. "If you didn't pry, maybe you wouldn't get answers you didn't like." She left that a moment before shaking her head and correcting him wearily. "In case you hadn't noticed, Nathan turning into a plant-monster is a spectacularly unromantic situation. We slept. In the same bed. With a blanket between us. He's surprisingly clingy for a guy who can't feel, but." She drew her hand across the air in a brisk gesture that clearly meant: zip.

Then she leaned forward and stole a waffle. "Mm!" Some incoherent chewing later, she patted the sofa next to her and said, "Okay, you can stay." Then she stole a pancake, but this time took a plate and some cutlery, too, still licking at her fingers from the waffle.

Before he sat down, Duke raided her kitchen for some glasses so he could pour himself an orange juice. Nathan's gun belt and jacket slung over the back of a chair gave him pause. This was... freakish. And wrong! Nathan... well, Nathan was basically a Ken doll, wasn't he? Oh, he had the parts, but they didn't work. Duke was pretty sure of that. (Although maybe not absolutely sure, or he'd have no reason to worry.) As for Audrey, Duke still had his hopes, since it wasn't like any other competition had presented itself. Except for, yeah, Ken doll. So no serious competition.

There was something about the idea of Audrey hooking up with Nathan, particularly, that really bothered him... Nathan was a friend, or at least someone he'd known a long time, so maybe it felt too close. Like his girlfriend was being poached away by his brother. Maybe not quite that.

He sat next to Audrey on the sofa, and presently Nathan emerged from the bathroom. Duke did not want to know what colossal enterprise he'd been doing in there all that time, but he was surprised to note that Nathan looked... perfectly normal, or normalish, because he was clad in a thin white T-shirt with jeans and no socks, and Duke didn't think he'd seen him in so few clothes since they were eight.

He saw Duke seated there and stopped in his tracks. "Great."

"He brought pancakes," Audrey said encouragingly. She might or might not be sleeping with Nathan, but had plenty of experience as his cop partner in how to tame the savage beast.

"Did you get better?" Duke asked, looking him up and down. Nathan had some red marks on the exposed skin of his face, hands and feet, but Duke couldn't see any sign of the freakin' foliage he'd thought he'd seen last night.

"No," Nathan said curtly, stomping over. "Just been weeding." He kept his distance from Duke as he took a plate loaded with pancakes and the black coffee from the tray and retreated to the table at the other end of the room to sit and eat.

Duke stared incredulously between the two cops. "Weed--?"

"It's kind of gross," Audrey admitted, shooting a look of apology at her partner. "The things grow. They hurt. People go crazy. Pulling them out sets them back, but hurts more. Only Mr. Numb here..." She waved her hand. "At least Nathan gets a reprieve from that part."

"Weeding," Duke said flatly. "That is fucking vile. Now I wish I hadn't brought you breakfast." He watched Nathan, who only shrugged sullenly. "So everyone else who's been struck by this is, what, catatonic?"

Audrey visibly winced. Out of the corner of his eye -- his eyes were still on Nathan -- he saw her stuff another calorie-laden breakfast offering into her mouth. Okay, so Officer Parker was stressed. As for Detective Wuornos, who knew behind that face of his? Audrey said, muffled, "Kind of the opposite."

"But I guess at least they don't have to think about it." 'Stiff' was much Nathan's default state, but today's stance was even more robotic than usual.

Nathan scowled at Duke's assessment and said brusquely, "We need to check on any new developments at the station and then drive back up to Camden for Lucassi's tests. We don't have time for... breakfast smalltalk."

"No wonder you're so staggeringly popular with the ladies," Duke put in, and even Audrey smiled, briefly, hiding it behind her hand in the pretence of chewing.

Nathan picked up his empty plate, went to the sink, washed his plate and cup separately, then let the water out and rinsed the sink out, too. Duke exchanged a few glances with Audrey while he was doing it, and there was some serious eye-and-hand-gesture code going on with her. She finally said aloud as Nathan was walking back, "Hey, Duke. You care to tag along today and give us a hand?"

He wasn't quite sure why, but from what he could gather, underhand favours -- hopefully sexual -- were being offered and Audrey definitely wanted him to say, "Yes?"

It was almost worth it just for the expression on Nathan's face.

***

Nathan argued, which was what Nathan was best at, and there would have been something amiss with the world if he'd responded to that plan any other way. Unfortunately, he was also making a lot of sense in ways Duke only wished he'd thought of before nodding and wagging his tail like a happy puppy just because Audrey had requested it.

"There's too much risk he gets this from me," Nathan said, self-consciously pulling on a pair of brown leather gloves that underlined his caution. "You want us in the same car for hours?"

"We could put you in the back," Duke suggested. "With the rest of the garden waste."

Audrey shot him a threatening look. "Nathan, he'll be fine. There are a dozen ambulance personnel, police and doctors who've had exposure that close and weren't infected."

Duke held up his hands in mock surrender. "Believe me, I will stay well clear."

Nathan scowled and dragged his hood up to shade his face, even though right now he had no visible greenery. He took off out the door and down the steps. Audrey sighed and rolled her head on her neck. Her shoulders sagged and she looked frankly at Duke. "Sorry. He's not doing so great with this. And... thanks."

"Just seemed like Nathan to me." He stared after the other man, feeling his face pull tight with concern. "This Trouble... it's a bad one, huh?"

"Really bad." She squeezed his arm as she went past, heading out the door after Nathan. Duke followed, letting the lock click shut behind him.

Nathan might have stalked off in a temper tantrum, but he was still waiting for them outside in his Ford Bronco. His gloved fingers curled and uncurled on the steering wheel as Duke watched. His gaze was hidden under the hood. He barely twitched as Audrey got in the front and Duke climbed in back, in perfect sync.

Audrey's phone rang as they were pulling out. "Dr Lucassi," she said with surprise at the voice on the other end, so high and fast that Duke could hear it from behind her. "We should be with you by ten--"

"The situation's changed." The tinny voice was sharp with panic, and it carried. "I need you here faster than that. You and Detective Wuornos, in particular."

"We can go straight there," Nathan said from the driver's seat. "Phone the station."

"We're coming," Audrey said. "So what's hap--"

"No distractions," Duke heard, before the person on the other end of the line cut off. He offered, with prodding intent, "Helpful, this friend of yours?"

"He's just... focused," Audrey said. "I'm ringing the station to check in."

From the exchanges between the two cops, Duke gathered that there had been no further victims of the Trouble in Haven overnight, and Haven PD in general were relieved, though Nathan and Audrey were perplexed, sending theories back and forth at each other across the front of the truck.

"Maybe whatever exacerbated their Trouble has been resolved?"

Nathan gave Audrey the wounded look of, then why the hell is this still happening to me? and countered, "Maybe they've learned to take their own precautions?"

Audrey grimaced as Nathan removed a gloved hand from the steering wheel, flexing it indicatively. "Not that I want more victims, exactly, but if this dries up, it's going to make finding who's responsible a lot harder. It's already a needle in a haystack."

"We've still got people checking Mrs Geraghty's neighbours. It's the only cluster we have."

"If she got it somehow from Flaxton, or someone else he infected, it doesn't mean anything."

"Parker, relax. That doesn't have to mean we need somebody else to be hit by this to crack it."

"Nathan Wuornos, poster boy for self-sacrifice," Duke couldn't resist throwing in. "Do you know what you sound like? Seriously, you're a fucking cartoon character."

"Whereas you'd just be happy to have people drop like flies if it would lead to a way to save your bacon," Nathan chewed sourly back. Duke had hopes -- small ones, true -- that there was a hint of a sarcastic question mark in there.

"No. No, I wouldn't. But if it's the lead it takes to finish this and get your infested carcass out of my premises... sure, I'll take a few more helpful leads." He left it a beat, and told Audrey, "Still serious about fumigating."

"I'm not infested, Duke. I don't have termites!" Nathan went as far as to slam his hand on the steering wheel and half turn around from the road.

"Overgrown, then, and watch where you spray, buddy." Duke mimed wiping his face off and Nate turned from the road again in a hilariously dismayed double-take before his eyes went stony as the penny dropped.

"Whoa." Audrey grabbed his shoulder. "Eyes forward." But she was grinning, and the glance she stole at Duke was appreciative.

He'd figured it out: there weren't many things in the world that could drive Nathan Wuornos to distraction better than he could.

***

Camden Hospital was a flat-roofed nightmare of architectural blandness, and the journey there had been surreal at best. Duke consciously got out of the car on the opposite side from Nathan, and stretched out the kinks in his stiff back. Audrey and Nathan, he'd observed in the past few hours, had become a secretive but not very subtle combo of intent glances and nervous smiles. Something was definitely going on with the two cops today, and Duke's suspicions were rising (and his heart sinking) about how much stock he could put in their protests.

Nathan's face had visible foliage again, and he and Audrey fussed with his hoodie and a spot of fast pruning in front of the wing mirror. Duke grimaced, watching them, and continued to grimace at the way Nathan tucked his head down and hunched when he walked. But they made it across the parking lot without anyone crying Day of the Triffids on them. Duke automatically found himself falling into step behind Nathan, watchful and defensive, shielding him from the outside world and any other potential suspicion as they walked into the hospital.

When he saw the ward where the rest of the victims were, he was stripped of words for almost two minutes. He just looked through that big reinforced window and fucking stared. Because -- Audrey had said this was pain. Just pain. Nathan's Trouble didn't protect him from anything else. And Duke wasn't any Detective Do-Right, but he kind of understood, right then, where Nathan was at when he said he didn't want a lead to have to come from any further victims.

What he saw in that room was obscene.

"You can't do anything for them?" he demanded of the odd little man in the lab coat. Lucassi, or whatever his name was. Duke had a vague idea he might have met the doctor before, but at that moment, that was the last thing he paid attention to. "Drugs, or -- drugs? Anything?" There was a little too much heat in his voice.

"Electricity's the only thing that works," Audrey said, prompted by Lucassi's nervous glance. "Duke, this is it. We can't do anything without risking harming them even more."

Something else occurred to Duke and hit him like a cold shower. He stared at Nathan, hovering with his hands in his pockets at the other end of the lab, and jabbed a finger at the ward behind the glass. "That's where he thinks he ought to be? Where you should -- we should put him?" Audrey didn't reply, but for lowering her head in what might have been a solitary nod. Duke got the gist. "No fucking way. I am not leaving him--"

No. There were no words.

"I'm not leaving him, either," she said.

Nathan, keeping his face averted so they could see no more than his profile, rasped, "You're both being irrational. If it's necessary... It's got to be enough for all of these people."

"All of these people aren't coherent enough to know about it," Duke snapped. "Anyway, who else is going to solve this if not you guys?"

"Lucassi," Audrey spoke up abruptly. "What's with the guy by the door. And all of...?" She gestured, with both hands to the shelf unit and table blocking off the door of the lab. "Is this why you called us?"

Duke pressed his face closer to the glass and tried to get a look at the figure just standing there, in the shadows. Why the hell was he in there, if he wasn't like the others? Duke had just assumed, he had to admit, that blocking off the door was a reasonable reaction to all the locked-up crazy people. The kind of reassurance he could get behind.

But Lucassi was nodding. "It's Flaxton. The first victim." From the glance he shot over, that was for Duke's benefit. "He just... calmed down, all of a sudden. I don't think he's strictly Flaxton, anymore."

"Not Flaxton?" Nathan had ventured closer, pushing his hood back. Tendrils weaved in with his hair, making him look like some weird hippie. His face was ok, since he and Audrey had attacked it back at the car. But his neck and the sides of his jaw were almost criss-crossed with the insidious fronds. "Then who?"

Duke staggered back as the statue-still man abruptly lunged and slammed into the glass right the other side of his face. He almost fell, and Lucassi grabbed his arm with a wry snort to steady him. "That's the problem." The doctor patted Duke's shoulder then let go. "I can't get him to speak, but he seems to act with purpose. He wants out of that room, that much is clear. He started dismantling the beds for metal pieces to take the hinges off the door. All I could do was board up and barricade from this side." He gave Audrey and Nathan a once-over. "That's why I need both of you. We have to restrain him before he gets out and creates more victims. I can't risk a physical confrontation even if I..." Lucassi shrugged. Duke couldn't really blame him. "But you're immune, and Detective Wuornos is already exposed."

The muscles in Nathan's face tightened but he gave a calm nod. "Okay. We'll get him secured."

Duke had the dubious privilege of watching that through the window, but at least wasn't expected to help. Flaxton seemed to have gained almost Hulk-like strength, flinging the two cops about the room and avoiding Audrey's taser. Nathan finally managed to slam him down and lock him in a wrestling hold that Duke was kind of impressed he even knew. Audrey locked handcuffs on him and between the two of them they hauled Flaxton to a spare bed and strapped him down with metal-reinforced padded cuffs provided by Lucassi.

When they were finished, they got the lovely job of substituting the light restraints on the tormented remainder of the victims for the more heavy-duty version. Nathan staggered out finally with the back of his hand clamped over his face -- more greenish again now, and not just from the growths.

"Tell me," he asked Lucassi. "How many days... hours... from infection to zombie?"

Oh, shit, thought Duke. Shit.

***

Even Duke didn't have a lot to say in the car, although occasionally he offered it anyway. Nathan blocked it out, for the most part. There had been about 60 hours between Flaxton's infection and the moment he'd stopped screaming and become something else, but that didn't mean Nathan had that long. His memory kept replaying the infected man's vacant eyes as Flaxton fought against him and Parker: inhuman, controlled, and a fate his own Trouble couldn't protect him from.

Before they left the lab, Lucassi snuck him in for the promised scans, and as a result of a biopsy, he now had a deep hole in his arm that was very thoroughly bandaged. Nathan's blood, at the moment, was a toxic substance. That didn't help his anxiety, considering he couldn't easily tell when he was bleeding.

After the tests, they'd left to get the investigative work done while they still could. There'd been one more victim overnight at Camden, but she was a hospital lab worker, and it seemed more likely she'd had contact with an affected sample than they'd find anything relevant at her home, or by questioning her family and friends. That didn't mean they could afford not to.

They stopped at a fast food place on the way. A necessary stop, not so much for food and coffee, but so Nathan could use the rest room and make himself look human again. Parker waited a few minutes for him to deal with the most personal areas and other business, then knocked on the door and slipped in. Nathan could imagine what the sparse clientele of the place thought was going on. What actually happened was that Parker double-checked he'd removed everything visible from his hands and face, then picked up and bagged all the stray pieces, and disinfected the whole room. The last thing they wanted was to create more victims in their wake. By the time they emerged, that burger joint probably had the cleanest rest room in Maine.

Duke waited at a nearby table, eying a burger with disdain in between bites and mechanical chewing. He looked up, let the burger drop through his fingers into the cardboard tray, and pronounced, "Disgusting." He raked his eyes critically over Nathan, who suspected he wasn't just talking about the burger. Nathan had almost gone beyond embarrassment or irritation. He had worse problems and, in the scheme of things, that meant he didn't have to care. Even if Duke had been invited along to witness his humiliation.

"Nate."

When he looked back, Duke had stood up and was extending to him, with curious intensity, a tall carton of black coffee.

"It's cool enough to drink." Duke tipped his head. "You were... in there a while." He held onto the cup at the rim with his fingertips until Nathan had taken a good grip around the base with both hands, then Duke dragged his hand back with relief.

It had been a hell of a lot closer than Nathan had expected him to risk getting, now he'd seen all the details of what they were faced with; what infection would mean for Duke. In fact, that was far too close.

"Don't," Nathan warned, looking down at his coffee, then across at his old friend and adversary. "Thanks. But -- nothing to prove, okay? Don't risk it." He gulped from the coffee and since he didn't particularly want to see Duke's reaction, didn't look for it, fumbling with the cup and keeping a close -- and unfortunately necessary -- eye on his gloved fingers instead.

"Thanks, Duke," Parker said warmly as she was handed something sweet and hot, which Nathan could smell from six feet away.

They were walking back to the car when Parker's phone rang. She listened a few moments, then handed it to Nathan. "Lucassi. Test results." Her eyes were crinkled and her face drawn tight, but there hadn't been time for Lucassi to divulge any news. So Nathan told himself as he raised the phone to his ear. "Wuornos."

"I've compared the data from you and Flaxton," Lucassi said. "You've still a good way to go yet. Your disease progression was always faster, but the precautions you've been taking -- removing the visible infiltrates as often as possible -- are having something of a slowing effect. It's still working inwards, still trying to take control over major nerves, but you've gained some time, I believe, if you keep doing what you're doing. I'd say we don't have to start really worrying until tomorrow afternoon. I thought... well, that you'd want to know at once."

"It's good to know," Nathan agreed dryly. He quirked a smile at Audrey and Duke, hopefully reassuring them. "Mind if I put Parker back on? Don't know if she'll believe it from me."

He handed the phone back. "Reprieve," he said, upon Duke's questioning look. "An extra day, maybe."

"Oh, right. So we have time."

He rolled his eyes at Duke's borderline sarcasm. "Better than no time."

"Hey, pipe down." Parker's beam of relief was temporary. Her face fell as she listened to the phone again. "Guys," she said. "Lucassi says... particles started showing up in the air filtration system, about the time Flaxton changed. When this gets to stage zombie, we've got a bigger problem. Something about this Trouble becomes airborne."

***

They spent the early part of the afternoon checking out the new victim in Camden, hoping for a breakthrough that never materialized. Even the gardening connection brought them nothing: Desty lived in an apartment block with a concreted-over lot outside, and they could find nothing to even hint at the possibility she might know Flaxton. They paid another visit to Ryan's Garden Centre anyway, quizzing the staff again with photographs of all the victims, then drove back and checked out the smaller garden centre in Haven, in search of any connection there.

Empty handed, they finally returned to Haven Police Station, where Nathan hung in his office and tried to stay out of everyone's way. He couldn't risk drawing more than passing attention -- he'd made another nasty attempt to restore a normal sort of appearance in the rest room at the garden centre cafe, but the growths seemed to be getting tougher to remove, and even though he wasn't green any more, he was pretty sure that right now he'd fail to pass close inspection as anything like normal.

He was dimly aware of Duke watching from where he leaned in the furthest corner of the room. Parker was trying to make enough of a show of being present at the station for the both of them and quizzing the other officers on any work they'd done that might not have made it to the files or the board yet.

Duke went out, came back, and put his third black coffee offering of the day on the desk beside Nathan before retreating to his corner. Nathan barely moved a muscle in the interim. Even though he didn't feel, as such, his body... felt... heavy. Like when he told his limbs what to do, they'd begun to resist him. Movements stuck. His thoughts felt heavy, too, and he had no idea if that was just exhaustion or if this was beginning to have some effect on his brain. Fear clutched at his insides, but at least he knew that sensation to be psychosomatic.

"Thanks." He turned and picked up the coffee. From the way the word blurred, he had the things growing in his mouth again. He hadn't thought to check there before they entered the station. "You're--" He debated not raising the issue at all, but really, it was astounding enough to merit remarking upon. "Quiet."

Duke spread his hands, or one hand, since the other just sketched the general motion, clamped around another cup of coffee. "What's there to say? You're turning into something from The Twilight Zone and we don't have an answer yet. That's not as funny as it should be." He shrugged apologetically.

Nathan looked back at the board. He'd felt useless the past 24 hours. Bad enough that he'd managed to get himself exposed and become a part of the problem, but he'd not exactly helped since. Even though he was out and walking around with the theoretical purpose of continuing to work the case. In practice, he was pretty sure that all it had meant was both of them -- all three of them now -- having to trail up to Camden and Lucassi and waste hours on the journey that could have been better spent on the investigation. Still, he supposed they'd have had to go up, anyway, to investigate the latest victim. Their first victim from Camden since Flaxton. But it ate at him that they were leaving so much of the work to his officers in Haven, and...

His sluggish thoughts stuck on that. "Wait." They already knew that Ryan's Garden Centre was better than anything Haven had to offer. Maybe they'd just been seeing that connection the wrong way around... Duke was looking at him like he was crazy.

Nathan tapped Flaxton's photograph on the board with a finger gloved in brown leather. "Flaxton, from Camden, infected in Camden." He grabbed the new photo of the latest victim, the lab assistant. "Days apart, Susan Desty, from Camden, infected in Camden." He pinned her up next to Flaxton at the top of the board. At the top of the chain of events. "These--" He dashed his hand carelessly across the rest, creasing corners and sending a page fluttering down. "Haven people. They were all exposed around the same time. Flaxton, or our Troubled person, interacted with one of them. We don't know the mechanics, but we've got the route -- Ann Penson was a keen gardener. Maybe she was at the garden centre that day, even if the staff don't remember. Maybe she was meeting Flaxton to talk tomatoes, too. She lived close enough to the others. Geraghty and Herril had to have infected each other, that was always too close for coincidence. But that means that all of these cases--" He paused and breathed harshly. He felt stupid, but at the same time, they'd all missed it, and he didn't think you could blame them. "All of them can be disregarded."

"We're used to thinking of Haven things as Haven things," he continued roughly. Duke's gaze was sharp and intent, getting there too. "This -- it started in Camden. It's in Camden. Let's say -- we say the lab worker didn't get this by some accident of handling Lucassi's samples. She's a part of this." And what was the one part of Desty's life they hadn't looked into today?

He stepped back from the board and looked down, and was surprised to find his hands shaking. "It works like a disease... What if all this time, it was under Lucassi's nose? If our Troubled person is in the hospital itself?"

They'd thought Lucassi might be Troubled before, but... no, surely it couldn't be him. He'd found the cases. He would have realised if he'd had contact with any of the victims beforehand. Someone else, then.

"Nice one, buddy," Duke said, looming closer over Nathan's shoulder than Nathan liked. "But tomorrow, right? I know there's a time limit on this, but we need food, and sleep. This has been about the longest day I can remember." Duke coaxed him with a light rattle of false laughter.

"I know I'm... stressed and... turning into a plant. But don't patronise me," Nathan muttered.

"Wouldn't dream of it, shrub-boy."

Nathan made a half-hearted swipe with his fist that Duke ducked easily, and Audrey walked in. They both turned to tell her the progress.

It still felt more like wild guessing than police work. But he had a gut instinct he was right, and at this stage, he'd take just about anything.

***

They went back to the Gull. Audrey wanted to go to Camden. They didn't have long left on this, and if she had to, she'd work flat through the night. Unfortunately it was almost dark, by now, and by the time they got to Camden it would be midnight, and there was a limit on what they could actually achieve while ninety-nine percent of the world was asleep. Nathan was a stumbling wreck -- which she only hoped could be put down to normal tiredness -- and Duke's protests were firm. Which was pretty funny, she figured. "Duke Crocker, infamous rogue, trying to look after us?"

"Well. Nathan looks like he could use some mothering."

Nathan was letting Audrey drive and staring down at his hands as he experimentally flexed them within the gloves, which she was taking as not-good signs. His face was worse and the visible green marks made his skin look paler. Worry clutched at her stomach and made it difficult to focus on the road. Driving Nathan's car was already enough of a problem. He did come to life enough to mutter, in response to Duke, "I don't."

Duke was the first out of the car. He leaned on the hood and cast an assessing look back at them both, watching Nathan struggle with the door handle and Audrey stretch over to get it for him. He appeared to make some sort of decision. "Dinner's on me. Just let me go in and... order it." He jerked a thumb back over his shoulder.

It wasn't what she'd been expecting, because his expression said stubbornness and she'd interpreted that as trouble, but Audrey appreciated the idea. "That would be great. Thanks, Duke."

She watched his back disappear into the restaurant with lingering suspicion. Nathan got out of the car and closed the door with his foot, trapping his hands under his armpits and looking frustrated. "I need to deal with this," he slurred. "Worse the last few hours."

"Yeah, and your voice." Audrey winced.

Upstairs, Nathan set about stripping off his gloves and the rest of his clothes. She caught sight of his hands, almost all-over green, as bad as any of the people in Lucassi's ward had been, before making herself turn away and leave him to the task. She already knew that her curiosity or pity didn't help. Nathan was a private guy. This situation was a hair short of intolerable for him. But he was hanging on.

He seemed to take a long time in the bathroom, even compared to the other times. As soon as Duke came in, voice announcing his presence with a flamboyant outline of their menu for the evening, Nathan slammed the bathroom door fully shut. It had no lock, but if there'd been one he'd no doubt have used it. "...And for Nathan, the steak," Duke reeled off, with barely a pause, wandering up and placing his mouth near the edge of the door. "Big, juicy, rare steak. Because I figured that veggies were way too close to cannibalism right now."

Audrey couldn't resist. He always caught her off-guard and made her laugh. But she gestured him away from the door.

"If he's having issues in there, I don't want to know about them," Duke commented. "Hey, chin up, sunshine."

She didn't know what he'd seen but she guessed her face had gone distant again. "Thanks for today," she said, and then reviewed the full menu he'd just stated. "You're eating with us? You don't have to do that. In a way, Nathan's right. The longer you stick around, the more chance there is you end up exposed to this. And you really, really don't want to get this."

"No. No I do not," Duke said wholeheartedly. "And stow the protests, Audrey. I'm in this until he gets fixed. With a bit of luck I can be more help than just a distraction, eh?" He gave her a crooked smile.

She returned it wryly. It never had been all that much of a cunning plan. And speaking of those...

"You do know that he and I -- well, we're not going to be able to do anything, even if green and leafy made for hell of a lot more romantic than it does." She shuddered despite herself. "I'm immune to the Troubles. Right now, if I touch him... he's screaming in agony just like the rest."

Duke's brows scrunched. "You-- He--" He stopped and took a breath. "You're immune. Right. When you touch him, Nathan can... he can feel it..." The words drew out with a faint wonder, and she watched something else in him retreat as the realisation dawned. He sank down mechanically on the edge of the sofa, and pulled at his fingers in nervous habit. "Wow. That's... amazing." His mouth twisted. "Annoying," he amended, and gave her a long look. "You know, it wasn't about muscling in between you."

"Of course not." She placed her hand on top of his. "I'm sorry. You've known Nathan a long time, I know. Whatever else is between you, you'd step up to help him out."

"But I was going to fight him for you," Duke confessed. His brown eyes had gone deep and soft, and Audrey had to take a step back and consciously look away. "Knowing this, I'm not so sure I can."

Audrey folded her arms. "He can feel me. That doesn't mean there's sparkage. Hey, he hasn't exactly given me any clues, you know. It's not like he's made anything even resembling a move." Unless she was to count clinging onto her like a teddy bear in his sleep last night, and honestly, she'd just been thinking of that as reflex. He couldn't feel. He'd been so ridiculously awkward about the whole thing that it had embarrassed her back, and she didn't know what to make of it anymore.

"Nathan's got no moves." Duke grinned like a wolf. Audrey remembered Jess, but she'd always figured how Nathan had been with Jess was down to male ego and not knowing if he'd be able to function with Jess. That shouldn't apply in this case, although she had to assume it still wouldn't be one hundred percent normal. Sure, he could feel her, but he still couldn't feel himself unless she was directly touching him. Any physical relationship with Nathan was at least going to be a little bit complicated. "Besides." Duke stood up, stepped in close and pulled her arms loose, teasing her out of the little huddle she'd drawn into. "You are the only woman in the world he can feel. You know what that means."

She frowned at him, really not sure what was coming.

"It means he makes a move, then by definition, he's taking advantage. Which wouldn't be a problem if it were, say, me. I'm just warning you it could take a while." Duke turned and sauntered for the door with a wave over his shoulder. "Going to see if the food's ready to pick up. See if you can't dig him out of there by the time I get back." He tipped his head toward the bathroom.

"Damn," Audrey muttered, as she processed that last. She went to the bathroom door and hammered on it with her fist, dizzied by the whole conversation. Was there any move she could make here that wouldn't hurt someone? Not that she was making any moves at the moment, because Nathan was sick, and they really shouldn't be having these conversations behind his back or... right outside his door. Okay, the door had been a distance away. But he had keener-than-normal ears. Oops? "Hey! You all right in there or do I have to call the fire department?"

"...All right," came Nathan's mumble. He leaned over a pulled the door open. He was standing in his jeans, the rest of him bare skin. She couldn't appreciate seeing quite so much more of him than she usually got to see, though, because of the red marks all over his skin where he'd pulled out the plant fibres.

"Wow," Audrey stuttered. "That looks... worse."

"They're sticking," he said. His mouth moved oddly, but his voice was clearer. "God, and the taste is awful. Worse than earlier. They're... a lot harder to pull loose, now. Can you get some gloves? There's a patch high up on my back..."

He had not been kidding about them putting up resistance. She was vaguely aware of Duke coming back and some wonderful smells wafting through, and called out to warn him away. Typically, he stuck his head through the door, said, "Jesus," and stumbled off announcing that he obviously needed to fetch more alcohol.

"Helpful," Nathan assessed sourly.

"Yeah, he is." Her hand was gloved, so he couldn't feel the smack she delivered to his shoulder. "Otherwise you'd be eating microwave fish with potato waffles again, okay?"

He snorted.

"You're done," she announced, slipping off the gloves. "Now we both better get cleaned up and... covered up, before Duke gets back with the rest of the food. I don't know about you, but I'm starving."

She took his grunt for assent, and was encouraged that he managed something close to a smile.

***

The hour or so (it maybe hadn't been that long, but Duke hadn't actually been counting) of deforestation seemed to have done Nathan a world of good. Whatever he'd done (and Duke was trying hard not to think about the specifics), it had improved his speech, his movements, the dexterity of his still-gloved hands and, in turn, his mood. Although all but the last degenerated a little again as he hit the wine with more enthusiasm than Duke was used to seeing, muttering something about a bad taste in his mouth when Duke picked him up on it.

Considering how close-quarters they'd been in the car all day, and Duke none the worse for it, Nathan didn't take himself off to the other end of the room as he had at breakfast, though he did leave the two of them to the couch and sit separately. Halfway through his meal -- which meant everyone else had finished theirs -- he shot a closed-off glance at Duke and said, "It's good. Thanks."

Duke supposed it wasn't going to bother him no matter how cold the food got. "Is that a civil word from Nathan Wuornos? Call a doctor." It was lame at best, but Nathan's mouth twitched.

"Tomorrow," said Audrey, "we need to go over to Camden Hospital with a fine-toothed comb. Find where that lab assistant worked. Who she had contact with. Hopefully find our mystery woman with the ID tag. And come up with a way to fix this."

"If we don't," Nathan said, "you need to get to grips with the idea of leaving me there. Lucassi said from tomorrow evening we'll be pushing it. Flaxton, or whatever he'd turned into, was on a mission to get out in the world and spread this. I don't want that to be me. Especially if air contact is going to be enough."

"We don't know that. Lucassi said there were particles. He said he's still figuring out what they are," Audrey said. "And we're not going to talk about this now." She crossed her legs and hooked her elbows over the back and arm of the couch. It was damned close to slinging an arm over Duke's shoulders, and he leaned in towards her, just a little bit, unable to help himself. But he'd also never seen her look quite so determined, or pissed... or attractive. "Tomorrow, we're going to fix it. You are not turning zombie on my watch, Wuornos."

"All right," Nathan said stonily. "So we'll deal with it when and if we have to." Then he turned to Duke. "So long as you know." His gaze was flat, and penetrating. "You're sticking around. Right?" The last word and the question mark was distinctly an afterthought.

Although Duke's initial impulse was to snort at the idea of Nathan giving him orders -- yeah. Points for Nathan being quicker to catch on than he'd thought. "That's right, Nathan, I'll be right here. So don't you try any funny stuff." He cocked his head and wagged his finger like a pissed-off teacher. "Any plant zombie crap from you and I will shoot you."

"With your invisible gun," Audrey mocked, returning a trace of levity to the conversation.

Not for long, though, as Nathan got up, leaving aside his plate with about a third of unfinished steak on it, and went into the bathroom. He came back with his gun belt, separated the service pistol from it and hung the rest over a chair. The pistol, he set down on the table in front of Duke.

The clunk it made on the wooden surface was unaccountably loud. "I'm not kidding," Nathan said. "That thing -- Flaxton -- was strong."

Duke swallowed a few times. "Wow. You really can go in for the dramatic when you want to, Nate."

"He's not going to shoot you." Audrey hurled a cushion at Nathan, which baffled but failed to rock him as it bounced off his shoulder and he cast around in search of what had caused the movement in his peripheral vision. She got up and went to her jacket, and tossed her taser across onto the sofa next to Duke. "Tasers work."

"Tasers worked. Not so well on the victims who've got to Flaxton's stage." Duke watched Nathan force a smile and, sure, no working nerve endings and all, but that looked painful. "Besides, you'll be needing the taser. First line of defence, right?"

Duke didn't fully comprehend what that meant until an hour or so later -- after the most awkward Yahtzee tournament in history -- when he realised anew that Audrey and Nathan really had slept together last night, and they intended to do it again. Well, sort of.

Nathan was starting to show specks of green again, but no-one was really up to another session. While he was in the bathroom doing normal washing up and bedtime preparations, Audrey drew Duke aside. "Are you sure about this?"

"Never been more sure." He played with a strand of her hair. Okay, she was the only woman in the world Nathan could feel, and he had his resolve, but he'd had a few glasses of wine and apparently his fingers had their own agenda.

"If you shoot him," Audrey said slowly, eying the hair and fingers between them, "all else aside... I'll shoot you."

"So that's how it is."

"He's my partner, Duke." And apparently she really thought that shooting Nathan was a serious option, still, and just like Nathan, she figured he was only or mostly here to protect her.

"I'm not going to shoot him," Duke emphasized, then feeling it was all getting a bit intense, shook himself and amended, "Maybe in the kneecaps."

"Duke!"

"What? He won't miss 'em."

The click of the bathroom door starting to open pulled them both apart fast, but Audrey hesitated a moment, casting a frown at the bathroom. "I know this is technically your place, but... until this is sorted, it might be better if you head downstairs and use the rest rooms at the Gull."

Duke screwed up his face and figured, yeah. "I actually do think that is a suggestion I can get behind."

Nathan walked out wearing a shapeless dressing gown that showed off his kneecaps pretty well and leaned against a wall, staring at Duke while Audrey took care of her own night-time routine. That was weird and awkward. Duke would have figured on Nate being the more embarrassed about the situation, but his eyes were dull, and it seemed he was all worn down on embarrassment.

Audrey reappeared to save Duke, and fetched him a pile of clean blankets for the sofa. As he watched the two of them venture to the bed, even though it wasn't anywhere near romantic, Duke still had the definite feeling of something important walking out of his reach right before his eyes.

***

The night was uneventful, which was to say that Nathan didn't do too much restless moving about whether he was actually sleeping or just lying awake with his eyes open, and Audrey had her suspicions which it was. Okay, so maybe she didn't do too much sleeping either.

This time, she didn't wake up with him wrapped around her, which had been... sort of nice, but also plenty awkward as well. As soon as it grew light enough to be considered 'morning', she passed from a frustrated state of semi-dozing too readily to have been all that much asleep in the first place. She rolled over, blinking her eyes open fully.

Stared into Nathan's... and tried not to react too visibly to how green his face was. She wasn't sure if she succeeded in that. "Hey."

"Hey." His tongue fumbled on the word. She could see filaments pushing into and out of the edges of his mouth. A pale, yellowish bud the size and shape of a dime seemed to be growing through his cheek. What she was seeing now was the worst it had been. Was the growth getting quicker? She wasn't too sure Lucassi had accounted for that.

She pushed herself up in bed, fighting against a tightly-ravelled cocoon of sheets that could be no-one's fault but her own. Seemed she didn't snooze -- or not-snooze -- quite so quietly as Nathan did. "We need to sort you out..."

"Just stay." His hand slid up under the discarded end of the sheet, catching her shoulder without touching skin, and pulled her back down. "I -- if you don't mind. I know I don't... look the part, right now."

"That..." she said, hushed. "Is that a move, Wuornos?" She listened, conscious of the sofa, where Duke was, but she couldn't hear any tell-tale sounds from there.

Nathan didn't answer, but slowly stroked her arm, her collarbone, her chin. His face twisted. The sheet was between them. "Can't feel you like this. I'd like to try."

She could feel him, though she didn't think he could be aware of it; a pressing contact and fierce heat against her thigh through the sheet between them. The sheet was... pretty thin.

He waited for her permission. Audrey drew a breath as he drew the sheet down to waist level and grasped her shoulder with his bare fingers even as he buried his face in her neck. She felt his lips brush her skin and the kiss of his breath, briefly, before he made a choked sound and pulled back so fast his head cracked against the bedpost, but he didn't seem to notice that.

"Well, that was a wake-up," he concluded sourly.

"No good, huh?" She grimaced, brushing fallen green pieces from the bedcovers with distaste. If she was normal, then right now she wouldn't be hurting him. Of course, then he would be deadly to her.

"Ouch." He ran his hand over his face where it had pressed to her neck, chasing away phantom agonies.

"We'll be able to touch just fine when I fix this," she told him. "I hope that wasn't some weird way of trying to say 'goodbye'."

He didn't say anything. He climbed out of bed, his movements stiff and clumsy, and staggered to the curtain, pushing it aside as he passed. Duke's head peered at them both from over the back of the sofa. Nathan scowled and continued on into the bathroom, leaving Audrey to Duke's raised eyebrow.

They'd about worked up to "good morning" when a frustrated cry from the bathroom tore Audrey away. She knocked sharply on the door. "Nathan? What is it?"

"I can't..." His voice was all dismay and mortification. "The growths won't pull off cleanly. Damn it... There's some blood." She shoved through the door to find him standing pressing tissue paper to a hole in his chest, small but deep. She could see the discarded green fibre on the floor; the lump of flesh it was still anchored to made her wince. "Sorry about the mess."

"I don't give a fuck about the mess." Pushing his hands aside, Audrey grabbed for her gloves to examine the wound. In isolation, the damage wasn't too bad, but: "There's no way you can pull them all out like this. We can't have you covered in holes!" She sterilized it -- much good that would do -- and slapped a big plaster over. Which solved that problem, but not the fact that Nathan was fast catching up to Flaxton and didn't look normal enough to go out in public. She sighed and leaned back, her head aching, wondering what the hell they were going to do.

Nathan said, "If you try it without the gloves--"

"That will hurt you."

"No, it won't. It's pain, not damage. The damage is being done anyway. If your immunity will let you peel these off easier... all you had to do was touch Flaxton for them to drop." He posed it slowly, reasonably, but she could hear the hitch in his voice. "It's slowing the progress. Lucassi said that if we kept that up... If we don't, we might not even have the rest of today."

"No..." Audrey shuddered. "I can't just--" She cast about, and found Duke's head poked around the door. "Not a good time," she hissed, and shut him out.

"Try," Nathan said stubbornly. "Look, we know what comes next. Those things tap into my brain, I turn into some... plant-zombie thing... Believe me, I am game for this as an alternative."

"All right." Her breath was coming faster as she peeled off the glove. She tentatively touched one of the tendrils up near his shoulder. He gasped. It hit her then that slow and careful was only going to draw this out, and she pushed her fingernail beneath the stem and dragged hard. It pulled clear and Nathan's whole body jolted. He sagged backwards, barely staying up, both hands grabbing for the sink behind him. But he clenched his jaw, nodded, and braced. Audrey swept her whole hand over his chest. A few of the larger growths stayed, but thinner tendrils snagged on her hand and pulled away, much easier than expected, like they really couldn't stand her touch at all.

Nathan barely could. His scream tore through her.

"Nathan?!" Duke was pounding on the door. "Audrey!" It wasn't locked, but it seemed that after being shoved out he didn't dare re-enter.

"Go get breakfast, Duke," Nathan ordered, in a shivering wreck of his voice. Still determined. Still... hell, he really expected her to do this?

Silence from the other side of the door. Anyone's guess how Duke would react to that.

"Audrey. Audrey. Audrey," Nathan said. His words were gulps. 'Parker', it seemed, had been cast aside in the odd intimacy of the situation. As he begged her to hurt him. "We have to. Just give me another day. Remember, today... today we were going to fix this."

He cupped her face with his bare hands and jerked. The touch was rough. He pulled back and filaments cascaded to the floor.

Damn it. Audrey narrowed her eyes and reached up and peeled that bud from his cheek. She caught it in her palm, a souvenir for Lucassi. Nathan went down to one knee and his elbow landed in the sink. "I think... you need to sit down." Audrey held back a grab for his shoulder just in time. "If we're going to do this."

He nodded dazedly. His eyes were insensible already. His bare skin where she'd already removed the growths was clean and undamaged, no bloody weals, no trace of the sores he'd had even from the first from pulling them off by himself. But the price...

"Do it," he hissed. "Pain... I almost didn't remember what it was like. It's like it's... happening to someone else."

The only thing she wasn't sure of about that was just how big the lie was. But if she was asked to choose between her partner's mind and his body, she was pretty sure they both already knew which choice she had to make.

***

Duke had not gone to get breakfast. He was still standing outside the door and dealing with the fact Nathan expected him to somehow be able to calmly tear himself away from the nightmare playing out in Audrey's bathroom.

Fuck. Well, fuck. He'd never, ever heard Nathan Wuornos scream out in pain. Hadn't thought he would, either, and not just down to Nathan's Trouble because, hell, he'd known Nathan thirty years and he'd only had his Trouble for a fraction of them. That was so many levels of wrong. Nathan. Tin Man. Pinocchio. Ol' nerves of steel himself. Duke couldn't move his feet. Could only stand outside that damn door and listen to Nathan coming undone.

He could have lived just fine without hearing any of it.

Almost unconsciously, he sat heavily down on the nearest surface -- an occasional table -- and screwed the heels of his hands into his forehead, wanting to do something, feeling helpless.

No, damn it. What he couldn't do was this. He needed to move, because if their roles had been reversed, he'd hate this. He'd hate an audience more than anything, and fuck it, the least he could do was have Nathan his stupid pancakes ready and waiting when this clusterfuck was over.

Duke jerked back to his feet, tipping the table, and cursed and got on his knees to rearrange all the trinkets he'd knocked down. He shoved them back onto the cloth then staggered for the door, feeling like a clumsy, ill-coordinated puppet himself.

When he came back, they were still at it. Nathan's voice was hoarser, higher and thready. Duke wondered what the hell he was supposed to find to do this time. But then a cry died and no other took its place. The silence stretched, pulled out longer, and then Audrey opened the bathroom door, paused to address a quiet word behind her, then turned around. Duke caught the briefest glimpse of Nathan before she shut the door -- on the floor, completely naked, with his knees hunched up and his hands curled on top of them, sagged back against the side of the bath, chest heaving.

Audrey sagged, too, as soon as the door was shut, and honest to God, she looked worse than Nathan did. Her hands shook as she reached up and dragged hair out of her face. Duke went to her automatically, but she pulled back, warding him off. "Don't, I -- Nathan's blood -- I need to clean up."

She went over to the kitchen area and ran the water until Duke was pretty sure she'd got lost in distraction. "Audrey," he said firmly, coming up behind her. "Are you -- is he all right?" His disbelief at the whole scenario rang through that like a bell. "What even was that? Was it worth it, because--?" He realised his voice had been rising until he was all but shouting, and sharply cut off.

"I'm sorry," he approached more quietly, and keeping his voice measured and calm, "Is Nathan all right?"

"Well," she said, shaking her head and raising her chin high, though her lips trembled as she opened her mouth, "he's clear for another few hours, or however long these sessions are really buying us now. We--" Her voice disappeared, and he watched her struggle to bring it back. "We have to solve this today."

"No shit." The words were harsher than he ought have chosen if he'd given it a moment's further thought, but he grabbed her arm and held it. Her skin was hot from the water. What, was she trying to boil herself? He'd thought that Nathan's trick. "It's not your fault. You did what you could. Eat some pancakes."

"Pancakes." Her voice went soft and her smile wobbled as she looked past him to the tray on the table. "Duke Crocker... you big sap."

He spread his hands in helpless denial. "Hey. I just picked up what we were already serving this morning."

She sat down and gulped at the super-sweet, super-creamy amaretto coffee he'd brought her gratefully.

Duke made himself go tap on the bathroom door. Audrey's eyes followed him warily, but he was aware of the moment the contact broke away and she decided to trust him. "Nathan? Can I come in?"

"No," the voice on the other side said, hastily and harsh. Harsh with urgency, though, perhaps, because a moment later he amended it to, "But you can open the door."

Duke did that. "Jesus. Did you sacrifice a goat in here?" Mouth beat brain to a reaction on the spatters of blood all over the floor and the porcelain.

"No, I-- You know what happened." Nathan had his jeans on, but nothing else -- absolutely nothing else, by the look of his lines -- and was trying to clean up, best Duke could determine. He looked better than yesterday, with the previous sets of red marks fading and just a plaster over his left pectoral and the expression on his face to speak of his recent trauma. He cast an unhappy look at Duke. "Look. That..." He stopped.

How he possibly thought he would need to explain was just another of those weird Nathan mysteries to Duke. He waved it down briskly. "One thing."

Nathan stared at him for the flat declaration, then suspiciously chewed out the word, "What?"

Duke gestured him nearer and leaned in as close as he dared. He slid his eyes towards Audrey. "She can't do this again."

Nathan snorted, incredulity rolling off him. Not quite the reaction Duke had expected. Nathan soberly shook his head. "Nor can I."

Duke absorbed that. So. So... "So this is it."

"Today, or--" He pulled a sour face. "You'll look after her, if you have to leave me with the rest."

"You know it, buddy." Duke damn near reached out and grasped Nathan's shoulder. At the last moment he stopped himself, curling his hand instead into a fist, holding it an inch or so clear of Nathan's. Nathan copied him, and they bumped fists without quite touching.

"She's not going to take it well."

Duke wasn't going to take it well either, but far be it for he to volunteer that information. Nathan's voice had sunk so low it was almost inaudible. Duke tried to pick things up, casting for hope, casting for... a brighter outcome than the one Nathan had predicted. "So how are you doing?" he asked louder.

"Never been so glad to be numb in my life." The reply was heavy with irony.

Duke thought about the room full of people up in Camden who'd had days of that, and said, determinedly, "I brought pancakes."

"Great," Nathan enthused, then followed it up with the charmingly appetising declaration, "I need something to take away the taste of the vomit."

***

Nathan felt... wrung out. The morning had become a haze. He slid syrup pancakes around his mouth in a bid to reduce the other tastes there which made him not want to eat at all, more appreciative of Duke than he wanted to be, for the pancakes, and trying to make the most of them, thinking they might end up being his last meal.

He felt like he was staring down the barrel of a gun. This was it. Last chance. He didn't resist as Parker herded him towards Duke's truck, and climbed obediently into the back seat even though he could have managed to drive. At least, his fingers were more-or-less back to their usual dexterity again.

He'd had to contend with more pain than he'd ever felt in his life, less capable of dealing with it than anyone who'd had a normal body to begin with. Threads of shame hovered at the edges of his thoughts. Parker had seen that. Goddamn Duke heard it. But he felt emptied by the experience; couldn't even begin to contemplate repercussions and context. Parker and Duke were... there, and (oddly, in the case of the latter) if he had to go down, there was nobody else he'd rather have around.

"You all right?" Parker asked carefully, her eyes on him in the mirror, her voice approaching false cheer.

"Yes." He had no idea. He'd forgotten to be Police Chief this morning. Parker had phoned the station and reported in that they were driving directly up to Camden for the ongoing investigation, and if she hadn't, he didn't think he'd even have remembered that he was supposed to be putting in an appearance of working at all. There were no new cases in Haven overnight. The cluster in Haven had run its course, gathered up its victims. Terminated with him.

They didn't know what the endgame was, here, he reminded himself. For all they knew, this thing could spontaneously resolve sooner or later. He might return to normal. It hadn't killed anyone yet except by accident. But right now, if they didn't solve it today, chances were he was headed the way of the rest of them, and that would be an end to the reprieve his own Trouble had afforded him.

It wasn't like he was going to die today, but he felt like he was. He'd seen Flaxton's state, no personality or human spark left, attacking the door like a machine.

They went over a bump, which wouldn't normally have bothered him, except they were apparently going fast enough it almost launched him out of his seat. He sat forward and narrowed his eyes at the speedometer. "Duke, are you speeding? With two cops in the car?"

Duke's face went through a morass of contortions, uppermost of which was a comedic realisation of oh, hell. But what emerged from his lips was a much more melodramatic than necessary, "Oh, thank God. He's still in there." Parker giggled, apparently in on the joke.

"Funny," Nathan said sourly.

He didn't know how long Duke had been driving like that, but they seemed to get to Camden remarkably quickly. Duke hummed as he drove through its rural outskirts and his speedometer stayed, this time, strictly well-behaved.

It had probably already started by then, but the fact of it built up on Nathan slowly. He had a lot on his mind, and his body -- well, his long-dead nerves were still tingling with the memory of pain, and he really couldn't say whether any part of that was physical or it was all in his mind. Slowly, though, he started to register that there was something else.

He kept his mouth shut, because he figured he'd done enough of worrying everyone today already, and because, with the punishment his unaccustomed nervous system had already taken, he wasn't absolutely sure. Until other things started to register, too, and by the time they drew into the parking lot at Camden Hospital, he was also getting, in fizzy, on/off bursts, the weight of his body pressed to the contours of the seat, and the smooth cold of the window he'd pressed his forehead against, and the rest... Shadows of agony, but fortunately just shadows, yet, though he could see his face in the glass of the window with fine, green filaments breaking out all over it again.

"Parker?" Nathan volunteered finally, as the engine cut out, hearing the desperate edge in his voice as he forced himself to spit it out. "I'm... itching."

***

It wasn't a real itch, of course. Nor any of the rest of it -- not the blaze of reality when Audrey touched him, and he'd been able to feel, briefly but properly, about a week ago, so he knew this was still a long way from real feeling. The... sensations, for want of a better word, were just barely creeping through. He tried to convey all of this to Parker and Duke, but his protests didn't do much to stifle their alarm.

"This thing bringing your nervous system back to life is not good news," Parker said. "You do remember the state of the guys who can feel it?"

Like he could forget. He licked his lips nervously. Wet. Rough. There and then gone. It would barely have been noticeable, except he was so used to the void.

"Nothing's worse than before," Duke broke in, impatiently. "Remember? He's almost at the stage where they stop rolling about screaming and start re-enacting Invasion of the Body Snatchers anyway." The force in his voice seemed unnecessary. Nathan was surprised to note the level of stress there. Sure, Duke had been helping, but it was hard to imagine he gave that much of a damn. His immediate reaction to Nathan's scrutiny was a swift look away to focus on locking up his truck. Then he wrinkled up his nose in exaggerated fashion as he turned back. "You know? Something is different. He smells." He cast Nathan a judgemental look, up and down.

Worse, Audrey gave an automatic little sniff and grimace as well, though she tried to hide it, and didn't say anything about it. Nathan flung up his hands and swung around. Tugging his sleeves down to cover the edges of the gloves and his hood down over his face, he hunched and stalked ahead into the entrance foyer of the hospital, heading for the service corridor and lift to take them up to Lucassi's isolated ward. "Nice going," he heard Parker hiss behind him, and Duke's defensive protest of, "It's true."

It was probably more true in the cramped lift. Nathan tried to keep his distance from Duke, which was hard enough in the squashed-in space, but Duke seemed to actively be pressing closer. At the point he actually stuck his nose close in to Nathan's neck and sniffed again, Parker shoved in between them, pushing them into separate corners. "Okay, I don't know what's going on here, after you've done okay -- relatively speaking -- the whole of yesterday, but this is not the time to play at being eight years old again."

Duke shook himself and the lift creaked to a halt, and at least freedom to move around ensured that Nathan was able to control the distance between them. Although Duke was looking more confused than antagonistic, now.

In Lucassi's lab, the weird little doctor was bright-eyed and ruddy faced from caffeine, and maybe other less standard stimulants, and leaped on them in the doorway. "Thank goodness! This is going to mean my career. I've been lying to everyone, overstepping my bounds... The alert went out from the lab at the back an hour ago. Two more victims, and these I can't keep quiet. The hospital has them locked down in a ward off ICU on the ground floor. The CDC haven't been called in yet, but it's only a matter of time."

"Lucassi," Nathan said forcefully, flinching back. The doctor's hands had been inches from grabbing him by the arms.

"Oh, it barely matters now," Lucassi snapped. "They're going to find out I've been hiding this. I could lose my medical license. I'm history. I'm pre-history."

"Lucassi, the 'lab at the back'?" Parker asked, intercepting and pulling him aside, much to Nathan's relief.

"There's a private-owned research facility behind the hospital. They rent out labs, equipment and services. Both of the new cases work there; went home last night as normal and this morning were brought back in the same state as the rest." His face went flat. "Both of them have families. Spouses. Children. A few of the kids are already showing symptoms. One of their school friends is. We've been lucky so far with the relative isolation of the cases. Today, this starts to spread. They're going to be asking questions about why I hid this, and how am I supposed to answer?"

"Focus," Parker said. "Right now it's not about your job. Children are affected. That's..." Nathan swallowed, thinking about it. That was beyond contemplating. Parker looked at him. "And Nathan is pretty close to the end of it, so this needs fixing soon in more ways than one. The victims who work for this lab. Do they work in the same place? Did they have contact with any of the same people yesterday?"

Lucassi spread his hands and walked inside the room, where he jerked a computer monitor around to face her. "Now you know what I know."

"All right." Parker's voice was breathy. She sat down, pulling the screen back in place, and her eyes flicked back and forth quickly as she scanned the screen.

Nathan hung back at the door. The hum of the lighting wore on his senses and seemed to vibrate in nerve endings that rightly shouldn't feel anything at all. There was background noise from somewhere; a dull, irregular banging. He asked roughly, "You said the lab rent facilities to the hospital. Any crossover of staff?"

Lucassi's face creased in thought. "You mean... oh. The girl from yesterday."

Duke's input was sarcastic: "The great detectives. You're seriously saying the answer was right behind you all along?"

"Not helpful," Nathan said.

Parker got up, slapping her hand loudly on the desk's surface to push off. "I need to go down there and question these people. And then I need to get into that lab."

"I can't get you in," Lucassi said. "I can't even get myself in. I have officially reached the limit of all the unofficial strings I can pull!"

Lucassi also seriously needed a good night's sleep, but then didn't all of them?

Wryly, Parker said, "Don't worry. I've got this. I might not have my FBI ID any more, but I've muscled in on plenty of shady jurisdictional arguments in my time. Even if I... haven't." She gave the rest of them a dubious study. "You guys..."

"Stay here and babysit Nathan?" Duke picked up, and before Nathan could react, swung around distractedly. "What is that noise?"

"...Oh, that," said Lucassi, more vaguely than could really be justified. He pointed and Nathan followed his finger across, and through the glass, into the darkened ward. It struck him that he could only see one occupied bed. With an ominous feeling, he paced slowly along the length of the observation window, until he could make out the group of figures clustered by the door.

The infected patients were loose, tearing at the locked door with their fingers and whatever other implements they could bring to hand.

***

Oh, hell, thought Audrey, looking through the glass. It muffled a lot of the noise, and she'd been distracted by Lucassi's panic, but really she should have noticed sooner. By the look of things, even if folks did manage to keep the new cases contained downstairs in ICU, they were going to have another disease vector on the loose here before too long.

"Parker, go," Nathan said, eying the glass. "We'll take care of this. You're the only one who can find and handle the cause. If it's in a building right behind us--"

Then I really can solve it today, she thought, and said aloud, "Right. Nathan..." Audrey looked her partner over. He'd been barely holding it together in the car, but faced with a task, seemed to have returned to himself. He could deteriorate to the same state as Lucassi's other patients at any time, but the only way she could save him from that was not by lingering here. She switched the focus of her gaze. "Duke."

"I've got him," he said. Hesitantly, he took Nathan's service pistol from a jacket pocket and, holding it by the end of the barrel, offered it back to Nathan. "You're not going to go all squirrelly or anything on me if I give this back?"

Nathan didn't reply, just stared at the offered gun, but Audrey shoved her taser into Duke's free hand. A last glance back over her shoulder showed her partner curling his fingers around the gun handle, shifting his grip in faint amazement, as though he'd never held a gun before.

Or just wasn't used to feeling it.

Not good, she reminded herself, and speeded up to a half run along the corridors.

The hospital was unfamiliar and the directional signage not great, and it took her longer than she liked to find where the two newest victims were being contained. She had glimpses through doors of people in containment suits, of crying children... Bad enough when it had been adults screaming and torn apart by agony. Audrey flashed her badge and glared at anyone who looked twice at her, and when a security man put himself in her path, said forcefully, "Get out of my way."

"This is a contained area." He looked nervously at the badge. "I've instructions. Even the police--"

"I need to speak to authorised personnel now. Hey, do you really think that suit is going to protect you for long? Look at me. I'm walking in there like this, and I can assure you, I am the only one here who has had all the necessary shots to protect me from this pathogen. You think this is my real badge? You don't even have the clearance to see my real badge. Now, do you want to delay me and find out how a town gets wiped off the map? Or do you want to let me through?"

He caved. After she'd passed, he might have actually run away.

A similar routine held against the doctors she met inside, but she felt it was wearing thin. She had to find what she needed and get out, before someone tried to detain her and she ended up with real trouble.

The two lab assistants worked in different labs, on different projects, so the priority became tracking down who they'd both had contact with. Their colleagues were corralled together in a room, nervously waiting to be checked out, and it took a lot longer than Audrey was happy with to put together a picture of where each person had been over the course of the last few hours of yesterday's shift.

There had been a ruckus in Lab 23 the previous afternoon. Someone's job was on the line, and both of the victims had stuck their heads in to find out what was going on. Finally, she focused the information down to a name.

"Claudia StJohn," one man provided with distaste. "She's a first-class lunatic. Trying to create synthetic nerve tissue from organic fibres, you know? I don't even know how she got funding, but you can't say she's not dedicated. I don't think she's left the lab in a week. Her husband left her last month, and... well, no-one was surprised. She was married to her work more than him even before. Now she's just crazy."

"She had a huge blow-out with the director," his female colleague added with a certain thrill. "He said she couldn't sleep on work premises. She claimed she hadn't been. You think they got sick because they went to her lab? Curiosity killed the cat, I guess."

"I hope curiosity won't end up killing anyone, ma'am," Audrey said, and gave both an acknowledging nod of thanks before fleeing.

Damn it. Was this the answer? Her heart pounded and she hoped... and wondered at the irony of Drs Claudia StJohn and Lucassi, both burning the midnight oil on opposite ends of the same problem.

The private lab was just across the staff parking lot. There wasn't even a gate separating it from Camden Hospital, just a thin area of grass and a few bushes to mark any sort of barrier between. She crossed the grass via a neat, paved path.

Unmarked black vans were expelling anonymous figures in white protective suits at the main entrance. At a side entrance, worried staff still milled, gossiping, amid a general air of commotion. Audrey ducked inside through the midst of them, badge and excuses at the ready.

***

Duke figured Nathan was still holding the 'babysitting' comment against him, but Nathan was behaving weird anyway, twitchy at times, dazed at others. He kept staring at his hands. He also seemed oblivious to how good he smelled, in a sharp, earthy way that Duke couldn't really figure out why he'd find so appealing. That was starting to freak him out, because it was getting hard to ignore, and really, what the hell?

Nathan also looked worse. All right, Duke couldn't see much besides his nose and chin under the hoodie, but he had a flat, yellow patch below his lip that Duke hadn't seen before, green strands striking out from it like it marked the centre of a spider's web. That was probably bad, and Duke wondered if he should say something. Then again, from this morning's example, pulling it off would probably leave a sizeable hole in his face, and knowing what Nathan was like, Duke bit his tongue.

"We need to think about this," Nate said shakily, turning his back on the glass, where he'd been watching the progress of the pod people. "I can't tackle all of them." No shit. He and Audrey together had barely been able to handle Flaxton alone. "And you can't afford to tackle any of them."

Lucassi said, "They're stronger now, but less intelligent. Flaxton went for the hinges, last time. The tougher restraints bought us time. I suppose it's possible they don't have the dexterity left, but I'm inclined to think it's down to the fibres further infiltrating the brain. Another reason this needs a fix now. The damage can only go so far before it's irreversible."

"Is there any way to better secure that room?" Duke asked. "You've control over the ventilation, right? Can't you... flood it with sleeping gas, or something?"

"If that worked, I'd have done it a long time ago," Lucassi said crossly. "Whatever the effects of the plant fibres stimulating the nervous system, nothing counters them. Except, temporarily, electricity. And no, I can't flood the room with that."

"No, but maybe we could flood the room... just a little bit," Duke amended quickly at Lucassi's appalled expression. "Put a current through it, then... zap."

"You'll kill them. If any hearts stop, we can't risk getting close enough to provide resuscitation!"

"Yeah, but Little Weed here can."

"Duke." Nathan's jaw clenched sourly. "Even supposing I could manage CPR like this, I can't help four at once. Besides, the base of the door is flush with the floor. I doubt we'll get enough water moving where we want it." He raised his gun halfway. "They probably stand a better chance if I just shoot them."

"Body fluids," Duke reminded him. "All over the place."

Nathan hissed in displeasure. "So we abandon this room. Seal it up. Then retreat back to the next area we can seal off. Then the next."

"All my research is in here!" Lucassi protested. He'd come a bit too close to Nathan, by Duke's judgement, and he wasn't moving back. Instead his eyes, already bright and feverish, were getting rather fixed, and he seemed to forget the thread of what he was saying, despite the force with which he'd begun to say it.

Duke yanked him back on the verge of grabbing at Nathan again. "What are you doing?"

"I..." Lucassi stared around like a wild animal in the headlights, then dived across to a desk, where he ransacked the drawers and pulled on a face mask. "Pheromones," he said indistinctly. "It's what I isolated in the air vents. Or more accurately, a pollen that mimics pheromones, produced by the growths. That--" He waved his finger erratically at Nathan, who stood aghast. "That thing on his face. It has a sort of twisted logic. The plant needs to spread, needs new people to... get close to Detective Wuornos."

"You're kidding." Duke pointed at Nathan, too, who shook his head and looked seriously pissed. "You're saying Nate here is giving off sex pollen?"

"I'm not," Nathan protested savagely. Like it would be absolutely beneath him to do such a thing.

"Please don't call it that," Lucassi said. "It's not a joke. If they get out--" he pointed to the ward "--people won't even be running away from them."

"Cool it, Shrub Boy," Duke said to Nathan, and to Lucassi: "I want a mask. Now."

"This is a problem for you?" Nathan snapped.

"I've only got one." And the doctor was clutching at it without the least inclination to share.

"Then... give him it. That thing is on his jaw. The mask will cover it. It can hold the stuff inside as well as out, right?"

Nathan gave a noncommittal sort of grunt, ventured up to the glass, and cautiously drew back the hood, staring into the reflective surface. Duke's breath caught. "Oh, shit. Nathan. Oh, shit." There was no appreciable difference between Nathan's appearance and the people in the ward, although close-up and in better light it was more obvious what the little discs the fibres concentrated around actually were. He had three on his face. The others were above his eye and on his cheek, and the mask wasn't going to cover them.

All that pruning had apparently just made the growths develop more vigorously once they had chance to finally take hold.

"He doesn't have very long," Lucassi said, as if that would be news.

"I've got Audrey's taser." Duke shot a quelling glare at Nathan, in case he got any further ideas about locking himself away from them.

"Ignore it," Nathan declared brusquely. "You need to stop thinking about this and think about them." He grabbed Duke with his gloved hands and shoved him at the doors... shook his head, scowled and stepped back, holding his hands out from his body. "Just... stay away from me. Both of you."

"We can't just start sealing off sections of the hospital," Lucassi said. "We need to get clearance, move people out..."

"Then take any research you think you'll need and go," Nathan told him harshly. "Everyone's freaking out anyway. Tell them... tell them it's spread here. Make them listen. Might as well panic people now. It's no match for the panic there'll be if this gets out."

Lucassi, nodding, stumbled around the lab, seemingly arbitrarily grabbing at notes. He thrust a ring of keys at Nathan, then with arms full, he barged the outer door with his shoulder. Duke was just in time to make a lunge for the mask and triumphantly claw it loose. "You don't need that."

Lucassi shrugged. "It's only of limited use, anyway." Leaving Duke to stand and absorb that gem, he hurried off.

Nathan went to the wall and tore off the map next to the fire extinguisher, the one displaying the nearest exit routes in case of emergency.

Duke heard wood start to splinter and yelped, "Let's start with this room!" They both leaped for the door, Nathan fumbling to tuck the map away, Duke clamping the loose mask over his face with one hand.

Nathan closed the door after them, keys rattling as his clumsy, shaking hands turned them. "This isn't going to last long."

Duke ran his eyes over it and... no. It had a window in it, for one thing. Even aside from that, it was flimsy compared with the inner door of the contamination ward that had just taken the victims so long to break through. "We need to find another line of defence, fast."

Nathan flexed his fingers on the key-ring and pulled the key from the door on the second attempt. Duke watched, cycling strings of curses through his brain. Nathan's hood was still back: he barely looked human. How long before he turned from help into a liability into an outright enemy, now? Still, at least folks would only need one look at him to take seriously the order to evacuate. He unfolded the map from his pocket with clumsy fingers and Duke took it from him, spreading it out.

"Here." Nathan's finger jabbed and traced a line. "That's a fire door. It'll be solid, next best thing to air tight. We've got two corridors in this corner of the building that swing around, join up and bottle neck down to that point. If we can make sure there's no-one left behind this door..."

"What about windows?"

"It's the third floor."

"They might not care," Duke pointed out.

"All right, we can seal any rooms with windows." He gripped the keys purposefully. "If they get in after that, there's not a lot we can do about it. We can only do what we can."

"Lucassi did say they weren't so smart now." Duke leaned close, hypnotised by the curve of Nathan's exposed neck, and caught himself.

"Or dextrous," Nathan countered, flexing and glaring at his hands. "Duke..."

"Don't think!" Something that had once been called Raymond Flaxton shambled up and threw itself at the flimsy door in front of them, and Duke fell back. "Just do!" He thrust Audrey's taser at Nathan and grabbed the keys. "You hold them here. I'll check and seal the rooms, come back for you, and then we'll both head down to that fire door together."

"Duke!" Nathan yelled furiously behind him as he hared off, both their weapons left in Nathan's hands, nothing but a map and a set of keys in his.

Not that he'd normally be that dumb, but he couldn't see what choice he had, and he hoped that Nate would step up to being put on the spot. Maybe just having that faith placed in him would enable him to hold on a bit longer. As long as was necessary. Not that Duke even knew for sure if Nathan's willpower could influence the matter at all.

Duke raced around, checking and closing. Lucassi had started the wheels moving ahead of him, and there were remarkably few people he had to clear out, but it still took longer than he'd hoped. His heart was beating hard, not just from all the running, as he pounded back to find out if Nathan was still Nathan.

Nathan was defending a still-closed door with a shattered window and looking like all kinds of a bad day. Duke grabbed him as he ran past and kept going, dragging and shoving and wondering why the hell Nathan was putting up so much resistance, and didn't stop until they were both on the other side of the fire door. His chest heaving, bright spots at the corner of his vision, Duke put all his efforts into locking the door and blocking it with whatever he could lay his hands on.

"Will you stop pulling at me?" He turned and yelled at Nathan, breaking off from trying to push a heavy coke vending machine in front of the door.

"Idiot," Nathan said fiercely. "I can feel it tugging at the back of my mind. I need to be on the other side of that door! I tried to tell you, if you'd damn well listen! Ever!"

Something slammed into the other side of that door, making them both jump back.

"Too late now," Duke said.

"Well, that's just great," Nathan hissed. "Any minute now, I'll be the enemy, and stronger than you, and--"

Nathan was really close, and they were touching. No skin contact, maybe, but hands clamped around arms, and one of Nathan's knees had managed to position itself between Duke's legs. Duke realised suddenly that he'd taken the breath mask off while he was clearing people from the rooms and he hadn't put it back on. But it was the same instant that he got a heady breath full of Nathan, and before he knew what he was doing, he'd pressed forward, closing his mouth upon Nathan's in a fierce kiss.

After the first taste -- which was awful, honestly; it was no wonder Nathan had dived for the wine last night -- it was next to impossible to pull back. It was, after all, something that he'd not allowed himself to think about for years, even before Officer Parker came along and took even the distant possibility of Nathan from him.

Under chemical compulsion, he had no capacity to resist.

***

Nathan pulled clear, slamming a fist into the side of Duke's jaw. "You idiot! You just infected yourself!"

Duke fell against the vending machine, then slumped to his knees. He choked a sour laugh and backed off carefully, staying down. Nathan, on his feet, stepped back until he hit the rail at the top of the stairwell behind him. It had not been easy to push Duke away. Nathan had... felt that. Sort of.

A surge welled up in the back of his brain, not so much an alien thought as a bundle of instincts and impulses: thrive, procreate, survive. He shuddered. He eyed Duke, who was pulling the mask out of his pocket, placing it back on, hands shaking. "Audrey... Audrey will sort this out before it can become a problem," he said, muffled by the mask.

Nathan hadn't anticipated having to fight Duke off. Right now, it was a question of which of them was the more hazardous to the other. He eyed the door, listening to a few experimental thumps emerging from behind the vending machine. Another wave hit the back of his brain, deciding him. He slid the gun and the taser away from him across the floor, one by one, then pulled his cuffs out and clicked them onto his wrists. He didn't have the dexterity to fix his hands behind him, so it would have to do. He slung the keys over his shoulder and listened to them fall down the stairwell.

Duke groaned and curled his hand into a fist where he sprawled, pushing his knuckles down on his crotch. "No, you did not just go and do that."

"Shut up." Nathan sunk down against the rail. He could feel the bars digging into his shoulders; raw, twitching, sporadic nerve sensation that went dead one moment and burst back into something akin to life the next. "I am... barely holding it together here, so you have to." Maybe he should have chained himself to the rail.

"You say that," Duke said, scowling, "but you have no idea. It's you. I feel all light-headed--"

"Should be a familiar feeling," Nathan growled.

"No, I can't help it." He sat and shuddered. "Do you know how much I want to touch you right now?"

Nathan licked his lips. Rough, warm, soft, slightly abrasive texture of tongue, catching him off-guard, making him think of Duke's tongue, a moment ago. He was fairly sure that Duke did not know how much he wanted to be touched.

Duke rolled over on his knees, turning his back in a swift move. A moment later, with a noise of frustration, he tore off the mask and spun back. "This thing... this thing is useless." He threw it down the stairwell after the keys. Nathan whipped his head around, following its course, then swiftly turned back as Duke lunged at him.

Duke clamped his fingers either side of Nathan's jaw and forced their lips together again. "I--" He paused for breath. "I'm already exposed, and fuck it, but right now I don't even care."

Nathan felt Duke's tongue curl into his and followed it, improvising in the moments when sensation failed. He pulled clear just far enough to appreciate the softness of lips before Duke wrested them hard back together and teeth clashed. Everything about it was wrong, but the sensation stole his breath and his protests. He barely registered his hands being pushed above his head until the cuffs caught on something and his movements became restricted. Weight pulled on his arms. He was forced to strain his leg muscles to lift himself just that fraction needed to ease his wrists. On any normal day, none of it would have bothered him.

Duke had hooked the cuffs around a metal protrusion at the top of the safety rail. If Nathan stood up, he could unhook himself easily, but the way Duke had hold of his body right now, standing up wasn't an option. A knee pushed between Nathan's thighs caught that push of his own body weight, centring it on his crotch, and the insistent presence of the heavy sensation made his breath catch.

Duke froze. His hands clutched in Nathan's collar. "You can fucking feel that."

"Sort of." He heard his voice emerge almost a whimper. "Not... really. It's not feeling."

"It's more than you're used to." Nathan felt Duke's breath, hot against his neck, then gone like a phantom. Duke pushed his knee further forward, until Nathan was good as straddling it. "How about that?"

"Hunh." The hitch in his breathing wouldn't allow him to make any more than the vague noise. Duke gave a pleased hiss and started to pull at both their clothes. Nathan felt his jeans being undone, and he felt Duke draw them down to his hips and reach inside.

A hand curled, deliciously, around his cock. "Oh, God." Nathan felt that through his whole body.

He'd been able to feel the other week, and despite what Duke had sarcastically opined, he had spent most of the night putting it to use. But it was still the first time in a very long time that someone else had touched him in a sexual way. Audrey... Audrey had touched his genitals, earlier, removing the growths, but it had been clinical and ferociously humiliating, and both of them had hated it. In no universe had that ever been the circumstance he'd let himself imagine her taking him in her hand and... making him feel.

But Duke's face twisted in revulsion. "Shit. There's... there's that green stuff down here, too!" Sanity returned to his eyes, swift and cold. "I can't even believe I -- there is something wrong with me. Sorry. Sorry. I have to get away from you..." He swung to his feet and stumbled back, hitting the vending machine and overbalancing half to the floor again. His pants were hanging loose and a fierce erection poked through the zipper.

He was echoing Nathan's thoughts from moments ago, and yet Nathan could feel his self spiralling away from him. Clutching for scraps of identity, something to hang onto, Nathan fixed on one thing. "Don't go."

"What?" Duke, struggling up, snatching at his pants, almost fell again. Nathan curled both legs around Duke's ankles and dropped him, quite deliberately, grunting as the weight landed across his own body. He pushed his face close enough to seize Duke's lip in his teeth, sliding his tongue across it, and pressing in for more. He couldn't use his hands, but he made use of knees and feet, sliding his shoes off first by catching them on a ridge of the floor tiles and roughly pulling.

Duke was shaking as he finally escaped. "Hey. Asshole." He grabbed the sides of Nathan's head, and there was nothing Nathan could do about that. "It took everything I damn well had to pull away last time," Duke said. "You're crazy. There is no way in hell that you can possibly want this. This... sex pollen, right... it must work on you, too."

Nathan only knew he hadn't felt like this until Duke kissed him. He couldn't exactly declare with any certainty that he was in his right mind, but at least he wasn't in... something else's. "Fuck me," he said, bluntly. "I'm not going to be me in about thirty seconds unless you give me something to concentrate on."

"I'd question whether you can be you saying that right now." But Duke was tearing at Nathan's jeans again, this time pulling them off altogether, over his bare feet. "Or going commando. Jesus."

Nathan hadn't had any clean underwear to put on that morning, and it had kind of been the last thing on his mind. He looked down and the state his legs were in made him wince, but that clearly wasn't Duke's focus.

Duke gripped Nathan's cock and he moved hard towards the contact, half wrenching his arms out of their sockets and not giving a damn. His mind tried to drift away, the invading impulses pushing in on him, and he thrust into Duke's hand with focus. Duke got his own pants down, one handed, and moved in. The adjustments to their position provided some relief to Nathan's arms.

"Damn it, Nate." Duke made a sound of frustration. "I don't have anything to use as a lube, so I hope you've got some spot cream or something, because I am just hanging on here, and in about three more seconds I'm gonna fuck you anyway."

"Then do it," Nathan panted. "I can't... can't feel much. Just shadows. Make it hurt. Make me feel it."

Duke gave a long groan as he shoved Nathan's legs back. Nerves told him that was uncomfortable, but nothing to the driving spike of friction as Duke penetrated, first with fingers coated by inadequate spit and then after, with barely any time or pause, roughly with his cock. "Jesus. I can't believe I'm doing this. You're not in your right mind."

Nathan squeezed his eyes shut against the pain and pressure, trying -- contrary to Duke's words -- just to keep in his right mind.

"Regretting you said that? Please, at least tell me you've done this before?" An edge of panic escaping through the raw desperation in Duke.

"You're kidding, right?" Nathan opened his eyes to slits. "Me?"

Duke fleetingly looked like he wanted to punch him, but mostly seemed beside himself, twisting both their bodies for a better angle as he fucked faster. He pushed hard enough for Nathan to stretch back, straighten his arms and unhook the handcuff chain from where it had been caught up. That messed up their angle but it provided opportunity to force his hands between them and push hard against Duke's chest, holding him back. "Easy," he hissed. "Easy."

"Sorry." Duke panted, wrenching Nathan's arms up again, shoving him into the hard floor. "Sorry. For later, just so you know. Sorry."

Nathan had to fight to stutter his next words out against the new angle and fast assault. "Don't be." He was barely hanging onto himself, and the only reason he was, and had for this long, was Duke. "Rather be... fucked... than brain-fucked..." If Audrey worked quickly, maybe he'd never have to turn into one of those things. He could feel Duke moving inside him. Not normal feeling, and in fact mostly a kind of pain, but he could still feel Duke by the path it took. His bare legs and the angles they were forced at were humiliating, but even thinking that meant he was still there to think it.

It hurt and it felt fantastic.

Duke cursed himself over and over, his face averted.

"Idiot," Nathan said forcefully, grabbing at Duke's chin and pulling it around. "You're saving me. Don't stop." He wrested his hands between their bodies again, pushing Duke's chest back, slowing things down. "Don't come yet, either, damn it. Make it... last."

Duke's hand drew a line of rogue sensation down Nathan's chest in return and he groaned with infinite depths of gloom, "You are just gonna hate me later."

"Won't that... make a change."

***

People were being asked to clear the building. It made it pretty easy to find Dr Claudia StJohn, about the only person who was refusing to leave. Hurrying lab coats, or irritably stomping security personnel, acknowledged Audrey's question with a jerk of their head or roll of their eyes, or occasionally repeated the not-actually-helpful description of 'Lab 23'.

She did, finally, find the room with the '23' printed in bold block letters by the door. Inside, a woman with long brown hair overdue a wash and no lab coat was arguing animatedly with two security men.

Audrey almost idly took in the semi-professional attire -- rumpled now -- glasses perched on the forehead, ID askew and barely clinging on to the edge of her collar, and tall, thin build... The garden centre lady. At last.

She wordlessly flashed her badge to the two security men and tipped her head at the door. "They called the cops?" one said. "Well, good. I hope you enjoy a few nights in jail, lady." The other simply glowered as a parting shot.

When the security men left, StJohn transferred her stubborn glare to Audrey and hefted higher the long piece of lab equipment she was wielding. "I'm not going. My experiments are at a critical stage. Don't you know what this could do? Spinal injuries, dead nerves... I could--"

"You could make people feel again," Audrey picked up, with heavy irony. She put her badge away. "Or make people feel too much."

"Not... quite." StJohn lowered the implement slightly, taken aback by Audrey's specific focus. "But my work could give people back control of their bodies. I'm trying to grow nerves."

Audrey bit her tongue. She had to work up to this slowly. She looked the other woman up and down, and turned to rearrange a chair and sit slowly on the edge of it, an attempt to present less of a threat. She gestured to another chair near StJohn, who didn't acknowledge it, then forged onward anyway. "How long is it since you've been home?"

Dr StJohn blinked, not expecting that, and she retorted. "Tuesday. But I've been working. I didn't clock out because I've never clocked out. Do you see a camp bed in here? Austin Terry in #21, now he put--"

"It's okay." Audrey held up her hands quickly. "I'm actually not here to admonish you for that." Tuesday night. Flaxton. The garden centre. And according to Nathan's reasoning, the contact that had sparked every other case barring the recent three. "So you've been holed up in here since Wednesday morning, huh? Three days. No sleep. No rest. Just working?"

"It's not illegal," StJohn said hotly. "I told you, my work is important."

"Hey," Audrey tried to pacify. "Not for me to judge. Fellow workaholic here, I swear. Look... Dr StJohn, do you know Haven?"

"Sure," she replied dismissively. "Pretty town. But there's nothing much there."

"You know it well? Got family from there?"

"No, not really. Not that I know of..." Claudia StJohn stared at her in abrupt suspicion, though apparently not the kind that felt the need to wave blunt instruments around anymore, because she finally clunked the hunk of metal down on the lab bench next to her. "Look, what is all this about? I thought you were with them, but you're asking the strangest questions. Am I supposed to have done something... officer?" She tagged a little politeness on the end, belatedly.

"You're right that I'm not with them," Audrey admitted. "I... think you're experiment's working, but probably not in the way you expect. I mean." She waved her hands around the contents of the lab -- a few solutions in test tubes and Petri dishes were in sight; a lot of big machines, a lot of computers and screens and equipment she couldn't begin to identify. "You're using plant material, right? But I'm guessing I wouldn't find anything in here that looked, say, green and leafy. Like an actual plant?"

StJohn looked at her like she was mad. "The fibres I'm growing are tiny, and they only use fragments of-- You'd need a microscope to examine them. What are you getting at?"

"You've heard about the alert?" Audrey tried. "You know those people who got sick, they had things a lot like little green shoots trying to grow through their nervous system."

StJohn went to a piece of equipment and started furiously checking. "It's impossible," she rattled off, her back to Audrey and almost oblivious in a wholly new way. "Even if I'd had a breach, what I'm doing couldn't possibly be responsible for something like that." Her frustration seemed to roll off her as she turned, announcing plaintively with moisture sparkling in her dark-smudged eyes, "And I try and try, but they aren't growing properly. Not fast enough, not anywhere near vigorous enough. I just..." She folded her arms and rolled her head back, helplessly, and hid her tears by turning her face away.

"You want them to thrive," Audrey said, with understanding. "There was a guy at the garden centre on Tuesday, right? Flaxton. Do you remember speaking to him?"

"Oh, yes," Dr StJohn said numbly. "He was trying to hybridize his tomatoes. He understood. We had a long conversation. And there was a woman there... How do you know that?"

"Mr Flaxton's sick," Audrey said. "I think everyone you've talked to about your work is sick. And they're spreading it to other people."

"Impossible." StJohn thumbed buttons on a machine, fingers moving automatically, and shifted along to the next. "I told you, it doesn't work that way." Her quick panic was over, swallowed up by scientific scepticism.

"I don't think it's the experiments, as such." Audrey shrugged and stood up. She followed Dr StJohn to the other side of the room, looking at machines containing little metal plates or slides full of absolutely nothing, so far as Audrey could see. "How much do you know about Haven?"

Claudia StJohn stopped. The moments of her body stilled in a very particular way. Wariness, a hint of fear, habitual disbelief. "I know they... say things. That town has the weirdest newspaper I've ever seen."

"Yeah." Audrey would go with that. She was relieved that at least StJohn had heard something, living in a neighbouring town. Hopefully it could make convincing her easier. "Look, I want you to come with me, okay? There are people affected by this, whatever it is, in the ICU. You need to see them. They're suffering pretty horribly. Some of their kids are starting with it." She met StJohn's eyes again. "If nothing else, you know about nerves, and synthetic nerve links. It could be nothing to do with your work, but you might still be able to help these people if you come and take a look."

StJohn looked around her lab, and distractedly asked, "How many people?" but the moment of indecision was actually pretty short, and she didn't even wait to hear the answer. At heart, her passion was for helping. Her obsession might run deep, but... "They're not going to let me back in once I leave." It wasn't quite a protest.

"They might not tonight," Audrey hazarded. "Is there anything that can't stand to be left?"

"I'll... make some adjustments."

***

Audrey escorted Claudia StJohn back down across the parking lot and into the back of the ICU where the newest victims were, using her badge and officious attitude. She thought that just getting StJohn to leave her lab might have broken the Trouble, but when they reached the patients, nothing had changed.

Dr StJohn stood watching through an observation window until her knuckles went white and her fingernails punctured the palms of her hands. "This is... it's not possible. You say this is something to do with me, and I don't see how, but... all three of these people, I spoke to yesterday or the night before. And I've barely spoken to anyone in days."

What really drove in the final nail was a further man who was rushed past, convulsing on a stretcher while suited, masked personnel held him down. StJohn covered her mouth with her hand, aghast. "That's... that's the director. I spoke to him, too. We argued for almost half an hour."

Audrey took a breath and put her hand on the other woman's shoulder. "I know it seems crazy, but... I've met people who can do things. It's... usually a Haven thing. But I guess it's not necessarily a Haven thing. We call them Troubled."

Lines slowly etched further into StJohn's face, as if she were remembering other rumours and whispered truths.

"I think you need to be careful what you get passionate about," Audrey said. "Just in case it starts to bleed into the things around you. I know you want your experiments to thrive, but it's destroying these people. Taking their control away from them. You need to let it go."

"It's terrible," the doctor whispered. "To think I did this? How could I? I'd be a monster..."

"No," Audrey said fiercely. "You'd be someone who didn't know what you were doing until now. Now you can change it."

Claudia StJohn had her hands over her face, so couldn't see what Audrey was beginning to until she squeezed the other woman's shoulder to alert her: the patients in the beds were stilling and quieting, their frantic movements finally relaxed.

Audrey only hoped it was soon enough for the people up in Lucassi's ward, and one of those people in particular.

***

Eventually, she found Nathan and Duke lying on a third floor landing next to a blocked-off fire door, and Audrey was pretty glad she'd persuaded Lucassi to let her go up alone to check things out.

But no matter what else lay in front of her, the first thing she noticed was that Nathan looked normal. Or at least, exhausted but human.

Normal was not lying in a heap with Duke, with his hands cuffed, and Audrey could see at least one undone zipper. She felt her eyebrows practically take flight.

It was more important that his face was smooth and unblemished, relaxed of the strain that had disfigured it throughout the last few days... though maybe a few new lines had been added to the other recent ones made by the Chief's death and his promotion.

Audrey focused in on that to divert herself from having to deal with the very distracting whole.

She made a deliberate noise, and Duke stirred, pushed up on his hands and knees with a deer-in-headlights expression and said, "It wasn't me. I mean, I couldn't help it."

"'Sex pollen'," Nathan said disgustedly, his eyes opening to slits, but he didn't otherwise move. Duke was scrambling for his footing and his pants. He tried to straighten up and half fell over Nathan. Standing on Nathan, who didn't object, he tried again to get up, and Audrey jumped the last few steps and grabbed his arm in time to steady him before he really fell.

"Wow," she said. "Okay, I'm... You'll have to give me a minute here. I'm trying to absorb the idea that apparently you both made out with each other before either of you made out with me."

"We did a bit more than that, Audrey," Duke said tensely. His eyes were fixed on Nathan, whose eyes had closed again. Actually, Audrey had never seen her partner look that relaxed.

"Nathan...?" she ventured cautiously, pushing past Duke and crouching down. Nathan was barely wearing his jeans, but she did her best to ignore that. "How do you feel?"

"I don't," he mumbled. He didn't sound too broken up about it.

She reached out and cupped his face with her hand. She was aware, momentarily, of Duke's stance turning rigid behind her, but Nathan didn't flinch. She rubbed the pad of her thumb over his cheekbone affectionately. "It looks like you're all cured. Hey." She gave him a couple of small, firm pats on the cheek. Much as she'd have liked to let him rest, there were still a bunch of people trapped on the other side of that door who Lucassi needed to get to. "Come on, lazybones."

He rolled his head and blinked increasingly hard, obviously trying to rouse himself. He made to get up and immediately ran into the snag of his cuffed hands. Audrey looked at Duke, who shrugged and pointed down the stairwell, so she sighed and drew out her own special keys and used those to release Nathan's wrists. It probably only cost a few seconds longer.

His wrists were scored pretty deeply, like he'd been hanging from them. What the hell had these two--? No. Later, she promised herself. She would have that discussion later, somewhere they could afford to have it. It promised to be pretty damn interesting.

"For the record," Nathan said, wavering as she hauled him up, and she and he both clutched at his pants as he almost lost them entirely. "I have never been attracted to Duke. I was just trying to stay in control of my own mind."

"I'd have to question that," Audrey said, frowning at him.

Duke raised a hand. "Me, too." It was unclear which part he was questioning.

"It worked." Nathan's jaw rose, setting in a strong line, defying either of them to contradict him. He leaned on the safety rail of the stairs and stripped the gloves from his hands, letting them hit the floor and giving a sharp shake of his head when Audrey moved to pick them up. The jacket with the hood was already on the floor. With battered bare fingers, Nathan clumsily refastened the buttons of his shirt. A few were missing altogether.

Audrey surveyed the two men and decided they'd just have to do. Nathan and Duke's dignity, on balance, was not as important as finding out what had happened to the people behind that blocked door.

***

In the end, Lucassi retrieved four living bodies from the area Nathan and Duke had blocked off. There was a bad moment when Audrey saw the slumped forms just lying there motionless, but then Lucassi hurried to them and started checking... and didn't even bother to feel for pulses. It helped that Mrs Geraghty was snoring.

"Sleeping," Lucassi said, scrubbing his wrist across his brow, looking like he'd love to be doing the same. "Just sleeping. It's no wonder... They've been unable to rest for days." He started to arrange for their relocation to proper beds and care, dispatching stretchers and nursing assistants. Desty was still in her bed in the observation ward, but quietly sleeping like the rest of them.

Nathan and Duke hung sort of warily around each other, trying to keep out of the way of the bustle to deal with the rest of the victims. They couldn't seem to pull very far apart, for all that some of the looks they were shooting each other were very mixed.

It wasn't yet clear to Audrey if what she was facing here was the worst kind of disappointment or a totally unexpected bonus.

Nathan. Duke. Nathan and Duke. Wow.

She watched them drifting in each other's space and wholly resented that she had to wait and hold tightly onto her questions and behave for so long before she could actually tackle this.

She tried to focus on the things they still had to do.

Almost an hour later, in the familiar lab by the ward which had been Lucassi's world for almost the last four days, but was an empty mess now, the doctor collapsed back into a chair, surrounded by his scattered notes, and released a tired moan. He looked at Audrey and pulled her a wry face. "I know what you want me to say, and I can't. The ICU report that the people who only came down with this in the last twenty-four hours have spoken a few words. They must have had a very scarring experience, but they'll probably recover fully. The rest... I can't say. It could take weeks. It might never happen at all." He shrugged his shoulders morosely, but his eyes cleared enough to allow a dim twinkle as he forced a smile. "But people are resilient. Much more resilient than you might think."

Audrey nodded soberly. "And them?" She twitched her head toward Nathan and Duke in the corner as she asked the quiet words.

Lucassi's eyebrows shot up. "If you ask me, there's no help for either of them."

"Kind of what I always thought." She grinned. "Well, you let me know what happens. However long it takes." She caught and shook his offered hand. "Thanks for the help, doc."

Nathan came over, his steps slow but purposeful, a heaviness to them that Audrey thought was just tiredness. He was still occasionally shedding green bits, and left a scattering of them on the floor that he didn't appear to notice as he pulled his hand from his pocket. "Doctor." He shook Lucassi's hand, too, his expression turning wry as he automatically checked the move to touch someone, after the last few days. "If you have any repercussions about this with the hospital, let me know. Maybe I can pull a few strings. If nothing else, Haven police department could use an ME who knows about the Troubles, if you feel like a change of pace."

"I might have no choice," Lucassi snorted, and didn't bother to thank him for the offer.

"Don't forget you can get someone to spell you now," Duke said, with a warning waggle of his finger and a sketch of a wave, as Nathan and Audrey stepped past him to the door. "Take this as a warning what overworking can do to you."

***

Nathan's hands were on Duke in the elevator down. Just a sliding touch of a finger along one arm first, as if to see if he could. Audrey found herself holding her breath as she watched them in the reflective panelling of the walls, feeling like an interloper, but at the same time, like hell was she looking anywhere else. Duke curled his fingers around Nathan's elbow in return. Nathan leaned against the wall, tired, unfeeling... but he reached up and drifted his other hand over Duke's, looking down at it through slitted eyes.

Audrey caught a glimpse of Duke's searching scrutiny, pinned on Nathan's reaction like it was everything in the world.

The elevator bumped to a halt and she watched both men shake themselves and separate for the walk to the truck. Nathan caught a few looks from passersby and self-consciously examined himself as they walked, frowning down at his grubby clothes. He sniffed and pulled a face. "I need a bath," he said disgustedly, and stared unhappily at the closed confines of Duke's truck that would make up their next few hours. "Sorry," he said to Audrey.

"Oh, so it's fine if you offend my nasal passages," Duke snarked, with a trace of effort.

"Half of what I stink of is you."

"I didn't see you complaining earlier."

"I was being taken over by Troubled alien plants earlier."

Duke rolled his head and pulled various contortions of faces before settling on simply saying -- rather unimaginatively for him, Audrey thought -- "Shut up."

They piled into the truck. Audrey opened the front passenger door, hesitated, then got in the back with Nathan. She frowned at Duke for his twitch, trying to tell him with her eyes that he had nothing to worry about. Then again, it probably got a bit confused by her own intense need to know if she had any place in this. "I thought you could use my knee as a pillow," she joked to Nathan. "Since you're gonna be in a coma the whole way home anyhow."

She also just felt an undeniable need to have him there, healthy and touchable again; no longer wholly cut off from her, and the world.

He grimaced and shook his head in denial, offering a small smile as a veneer of politeness. But they'd been driving no more than ten minutes before he was slumping to one side in his seat. Audrey pulled on his shoulder until he lay across her, and too dozy now to resist, he folded his long legs up on the seat. His hair tickled her hand. She let her fingertips stir it and, very lightly, stroked the side of his face. Even half asleep, he was still more awake than he had been when she found them both on the stairs, and when he saw the touch coming he flinched. But he caught himself, breathed, and pressed his cheek up into her hand.

"Audrey," he said, with a tired smile, and offered the apologetic reassurance, "It doesn't hurt anymore."

"Go to sleep." She left her hand cradled against his face, and about a minute later, he did.

"He's going to be embarrassed about that when he wakes up," Duke said. Audrey had been aware of his eyes watching in the rear view mirror, paying more attention to them than the road. "He might just come after both of us with that gun."

Audrey slid her other hand around Nathan's shoulder and chest and settled back, comfortable. That arm, he wouldn't feel; the fabric of both their clothes lay between them. But she could feel his warmth, and each breath inflating his lungs beneath her hold, and she needed reassurance. She said, "We came pretty close to losing him." That morning had been a nightmare; intimate in all the wrong ways. The feel of her hand on his cheek and his acceptance of her touch did something towards healing that memory now, but she was greedy. She wanted more.

I was going to fight him for you, Duke had said, last night. Of course, a few things had changed since then. Did she have to fight Duke for Nathan? Did she want to fight Duke for Nathan... or Nathan for Duke?

"Well, it didn't happen," Duke said wearily. His voice carried an undercurrent of about as much confusion as she felt, but also an overt hint of challenge. "So enjoy the moment, Audrey Parker." Was Duke planning to fight her for Nathan?

Make love, not war, thought Audrey. She said, "Do we have to fight? Or do you think we can all share?"

While he was driving was probably not the best time to ask questions like that. When the full meaning of what she was asking actually registered, Duke almost wrapped them around a tree. He braked and skewed sharply into the side of the road instead and, for long moments, sat straight-upright in his seat and stared ahead, not moving at all. Then he turned in an almost violently abrupt movement, wrapping his elbow around the back of the seat and glaring at her. Nathan pawed obliviously at Audrey's lap, but didn't otherwise stir. "I think we have to turn around and go back to Dr Lucassi," Duke said. "Because I know I'm hearing things."

Audrey laughed at him. "You're not hallucinating, Duke. Come home with us. Nathan could relapse. It's only wise for us both to stay by him another night and make sure he's okay."

"Yeah, and for me..." Duke pointed down. "But what about Officer Straight-laced? That seems a fairly non-standard arrangement, and in case you hadn't noticed, Nathan is not the adventurous type."

"You say that," Audrey mused, "but who's the one that made moves on both of us in the past twelve hours?"

"He thought he was dying."

She supposed Duke's choice of that word encompassed everything that mattered, whether it was strictly true or not.

"Audrey. He's probably going to wake up hating us both. Definitely me." She could see the pain in Duke's face as he framed that, probably only just working through the realisation himself, all joking aside. If they fought, Duke didn't believe he'd win. Audrey, who'd been watching them together, was nowhere near so certain.

"Well, we'll see. In the meantime, he's unconscious, so I'm voting in his proxy. Now, are you coming home with us or not?"

His doubts weren't gone, but it was Duke, and he was never exactly going to say no. Climbing up on his seat, he leaned right over. She pushed forward to meet him. So long as she kept her hand still where it touched Nathan's face, Audrey wasn't concerned about waking him. Especially because it had occurred to her that being numb probably made it really easy to play possum, and the way their bodies had been jolted by the car braking was probably enough to register even on Nathan's working faculties. She shared a long kiss with Duke over her partner's laid out form. He tasted of coca cola from the hospital vending machines and, faintly, of something slightly bitter, which might be Nathan, or at least Nathan's recent problem, and the reason he'd been pulling faces and rinsing his mouth out with so many cans of sugary soda.

Duke pulled back reluctantly, but with a brand new focus in his eyes. Very focused. "We should get home."

"Yeah," Audrey said.

It was a good thing Nathan was unconscious for the duration, she thought with amusement, given the amount of traffic laws Duke broke on that remarkably short and yet frustratingly long journey.

***

This was either the greatest day ever or the world was secretly laughing at him and just waiting to pull some evil cosmic switch. Duke's betting was still on the latter, because there was no way that he'd genuinely been handed the chance to have both Nathan Wuornos and Audrey Parker.

If he could have been more certain of Nathan's part in that... They'd been testing each other out in the elevator, but the guy had practically been asleep on his feet.

They got back to the Gull and Audrey pulled Nathan up into her apartment while Duke went to grab food -- no messing around today, he just stole portions of whatever was ready, waiting and extra. It wasn't that he wasn't hungry -- he'd not eaten since breakfast -- it was just that, right now, he couldn't make himself give much of a damn about food. He stacked it all high on a big plate that he could carry up in one trip. No worries about contamination between them now, after all.

Sharing, Audrey had said. Holy crap.

By the time he got up to Audrey's apartment, even though he'd been quick, Nathan was already in the shower. The door was left wide open, which Duke could only imagine a result of Audrey's protests that Nathan might drop unconscious at any moment; or possibly she'd just left it like that and he'd not noticed. Duke had a very nice view of Nathan's back, pink and uninterrupted except for a few paler scars, more muscle and flesh on him than you might think, to look at him fully clothed. He was leaning forward with both hands against the wall, and it was possible one of them was going to have to go in to wake him up, sooner or later.

"It's all right," Audrey said wryly as Duke put the food down. "I tested the temperature of the water before I let him go in."

Duke straightened up from the coffee table, rested his hands on her shoulders, and kissed her thoroughly. It was a lot easier, second time around, without all the awkward angles in the truck. When he broke away, she was smiling, and they picked at the food until Nathan emerged from the shower and pretty much staggered to the sofa and crashed there clad in only a towel and without a word to either of them.

They smirked at each other over his long, lean form, and Duke and Audrey went in the shower together.

For the first ten minutes they actually did focus on getting clean, because Nathan's problem had kind of been monopolising the bathroom and they both rather needed it. Duke kept finding bits of those green shoots in crevices he hadn't even known he had, which was disconcerting. Audrey ran her hands over him intimately, naughtily pinching at his skin sometimes in her exploration of a few more interesting places. Exploring his body, he did very much suspect, for nefarious purposes rather than practical ones.

"You wish, Crocker," she jeered when he voiced that. Considering where her hands had come to rest, he opted not to take it seriously.

They made love, short and tired and sweet, no gymnastic exercises or exhibitions of prowess. The water ran lukewarm over them both while her legs clamped around his hips and her fingers dug into his back. They didn't demand anything except what was there and present in the moment, and stood and washed each other off again afterwards under the spray, with a new, comfortable warmth filling the space between them, despite the fact the water was only getting colder.

Nathan was sitting up on the sofa picking at the food. He looked up when they walked out of the bathroom, and if his smile was rather stiff, that didn't necessarily mean anything other than that it was Nathan's face wearing it. He couldn't really have been unaware of what they'd been doing. He didn't blink much at the vision of Audrey in her night clothes and Duke in pretty much nothing.

A little awkwardness descended, because Nathan had been unconscious for at least part of earlier negotiations and no-one really knew how he was going to react, but Audrey shoved up next to him, and pulled Duke into the space left on her other side, which made for a bit of a crush on the small couch. Nathan put the chicken leg he'd been nibbling at back down on the edge of the plate and asked, with careful reserve, "Are we going to talk about this?"

"We talked about this," Audrey said, grinning as she touched his face with her hand, letting the contact soften the glibness of her offering: "Knowing you're a man of few words, I took your silence as agreement."

Nathan leaned into her touch, closed his eyes, and kept his silence. After several seconds, she withdrew her hand, and he blinked and switched his gaze to Duke.

"Hey," greeted Duke, and leaned across Audrey. She shuffled and hitched her legs up on top of his so she was sort of sprawled across and between them.

At first it was like trying to kiss a wall, or a mannequin, with lips that didn't respond and a tongue that stayed flat to the base of the mouth. Then he felt Nathan try to reciprocate, small and jerky movements that didn't really go anywhere, and realised there was probably only so much the other man could do; Duke was going to have to do most of the work.

Couldn't deny he was kind of used to it, though, in that relationship.

He sucked Nathan's lower lip in between his teeth and Nate picked up his nerve and responded with a sudden take-charge enthusiasm which went a bit better, but made things rather a tussle, before he broke away. Piercing blue eyes examined Duke's face from a distance of a few inches.

"We can work on it," Duke said, which got him a very narrow expression and a whole heap of sullen Wuornos.

Nathan turned in defiance to Audrey and kissed her, and that was a bitch to watch, and Duke found himself all sorts of... green with envy. There was no doubt whatsoever, from the way Nathan moved and reacted, and knew what he was damn well doing, that he could feel Audrey. But he couldn't feel Duke. Not anymore.

"It's all right," Audrey said, meeting his eyes when they were finished. "We can work with it. Let's go to bed and do that right now."

***

Nathan considered that after his traumatic day of almost becoming a Troubled plant-zombie, figuring out the logistics of three-way sex was a job for the morning. After Duke and Audrey had pried him off the sofa and into the bed, he sprawled back, laughing at their dismay while Duke swore. "No, it's okay," Parker said, a grin in her voice.

"Well, he's useless," Duke said. "But I knew that. You knew that, right? I'd hate to think you got this committed and then had to be disappointed."

"Oh, I'm pretty sure I can handle this," she retorted. Nathan's eyes were drifting shut, too tired even to care about Duke's jibe, but he heard the soft brush of shifting cloth. A moment later he was very much awake as feeling enveloped his hips; the silky stroke of skin and the warmth of body heat still fierce from showering and sex. His eyes flew open. Parker had pulled off the towel around his waist and ditched her own night clothes. She straddled him now, nude and smirking. Her blond hair fell into her face without quite veiling the glint in her eyes. When she leaned forward, he could feel the weight of her pressing on him, the muscles of her inner thighs shifting against him, the tickle of the tidy triangle of hair he could see between them. She'd seen everything of him, but it was the first time he'd seen her naked. He was mesmerised by her body, her pink nipples, the soft curves of her flesh. She stroked a finger down from his chest to his cock, and up over what was probably the fastest erection of his sexual history. "Unless you're still too tired..." she posed, lifting off him fractionally as if in question.

"I'm waking up." Exhaustion had officially been voted off the island. It was difficult to speak. That delicate, sliding contact had closed off his throat.

"I can see you are." This time she put her whole hand over him. Nathan gulped and pushed up into the touch, helpless.

Duke was watching, open-mouthed, frozen where he'd just begun to climb onto the side of the bed, his knees sinking the corner of the mattress. The expression on his face suggested he'd never seen anything more arousing his whole life, but when Nathan squirmed under Audrey, he gave a rattling, breathless laugh and advised her, "Careful you don't break him."

"Not gonna happen, Crocker," Nathan said.

Parker laughed at both of them. "Since you're paying attention now, are we gonna have this discussion? Duke wants to know how this works, and frankly, so do I."

"Now you want to talk?"

Duke sprawled out on the bed next to them and put in, "He's right. He's not much of a talker. More a man of action, our Nathan." He placed his hand between them and stroked Audrey's mound, then his hand joined hers on Nathan's sex.

He didn't feel that. It shouldn't have made a difference, but God, the sight... Nathan had to close his eyes before he humiliated himself. "Sorry," he said stiffly. "But that's going to be 'man of absurdly quick action' if you two don't go easier on me." He dared to peek as he felt Parker raise herself and found both of them had removed their hands. He breathed out in relief and raised himself to half sitting. He sighed and rubbed his forehead.

"Okay, I want you in me now," Parker said, "just so you know that. But I also want this 'discussion' to last more than thirty seconds. Duke, you up for taking 'sharing' to its literal conclusion?"

"I got it." Duke rolled up from the bed and Nathan had no clue what he was doing, but he came back sniffing at a tub of some feminine moisturising-something-or-other cream.

Nathan took a long inhale. "Coconut. Won't you smell pretty."

Duke snorted, and knelt on the bed with a big glob of the stuff already on his fingers. Balancing on his hand and knees, he reached back between his legs and went to work. Nathan didn't know where to look, and realisation finally cut through his tiredness and the stupor which had taken him after the events of the day that this was actually happening. He was sure his face must have turned bright red. This was happening, and this time, there were no distractions of impending doom to occupy the parts of his brain that would usually panic and object.

Audrey ran her hands across his hips, light touches, experimental, and his sudden doubt was short-lived. "Okay?"

"Careful of his ass," Duke warned, wincing. "I'm guessing he's more sore than I am, he just doesn't know it." He raked his eyes over Parker. "Unless you go near it, right?"

"You're sore?" she asked, distracted from her ministrations, a giggle lurking in her voice.

"Fucking Nathan -- and I mean that in every sense. Friction works both ways." He glowered and retreated his hand to shield his cock, briefly, and Nathan couldn't help it. A deep belly-laugh rose from him, jostling Parker as his body moved under hers. "Fine, laugh at my pain. Tin Man." The old insult, but it didn't cut. He was feeling more at peace with his affliction than he could ever remember. His mind might not have had an easy time of the last few days, but his curse was the only reason it was still intact.

"You were not complaining in the shower." Parker's finger waggled at Duke. Her hips waggled too, giving Nathan more of a jolt than she might have intended. He sat up further, sliding his hands beneath her buttocks, gathering her up. He wanted her touching him, desperately and thoroughly, but he wanted her to get something out of this too. Her as well as Duke. She joined his efforts to keep all the contact between their upper bodies. The sensation of her breasts against his chest almost undid him anyway. Nathan pushed his face into her neck, kissing up from her throat, working a path to her lips.

Duke made a noise. "You two are hot. And God, no, I did not complain in the shower. But my cock and Nathan's ass are definitely going to have to have some recuperation time."

"Just as well we have other options." Parker rolled her head to waggle her eyebrows at him. She nipped at Nathan's shoulder with her teeth.

"I'm starting to see that." Duke took up position behind her, resting his hands on her hips in support, waiting. "Anytime you're ready."

Audrey pushed down, and Nathan felt moisture and deep, deep warmth, closing tighter as her body claimed him all the way. Thought almost shut down. He felt like he'd been cold for a very long time.

She released a small, breathless, "Oh," and she moved over him, aided by Duke's hands on her hips, rising and falling again and again, pushing their luck until Nathan had to warn sharply, "Parker," and then, after a moment's thought, amend that to, "Audrey."

"Yes," she breathed, and with what looked like effort pulled off him, letting Duke move in to replace her. "God. Damn," she said, and it did seem to Nathan that there were some parts of this that would be comprised of a good deal of frustration, at least to begin with.

He leaned back, warring internally but letting Duke have total control because there was a limit how many demands on his concentration he could juggle; three in a bed was definitely a juggling act. "Here." Audrey knelt on the mattress next to him, pulling her legs wide, opening herself to his fingers. He pushed two gently into her, rolling the pad of his thumb over her clit. She drew in breath at the touch, but she grasped his face and physically turned it toward Duke.

"You can feel me," she said. "So look at Duke."

Nathan fixed his eyes on Duke's body fused with his. With visual cues, he matched the rhythm as best he could, but let Duke shift and make readjustments for them both until every thrust was drawing low, needy noises from him. His fingers, against Audrey's sex, rediscovered moisture and heat alongside the fascination of tracing delicate shapes without relying on sight to guide him. He was probably too easily distractible, on that front. "If we're ever to get this down to perfection, I'll... probably have to practice. A lot," he owned earnestly, and just for a moment, slid his gaze rebelliously her way.

"Yeah? Well, I expect diligent work from you on this one, Wuornos."

He felt her take and guide his hand, pushing fiercer and deeper than he'd dared go for fear of hurting her. Her body clutched around his fingers, and her breathing and soft moans sped up. Her hands faltered in their guidance but he tried to keep going without changing rhythm, until she pulled away from him with a satisfied sigh. She cuddled up at an angle beside him, using his shoulder as a pillow, resting her face next to his, and joined him in watching Duke as he leaned forward and continued to move over Nathan with greater focus now the two of them had finished.

Parker's hand wandered over Nathan's chest, creating a lazy pool of sensation that warred oddly with the unfelt visual of Duke's much more energetic activities. Then she dug her nails in and he involuntarily thrust his hips up harder. Duke yelled out, and Audrey reached across Nathan, engulfed Duke's cock in a fist still slick with her own juices, and brought him, too, to climax. All over Nathan's chest.

Duke pulled off and sprawled full length on top of them both, kissed Nathan, kissed Parker, and swore passionately for about a minute straight before he managed to express himself in anything other than awed profanities. "I am," he gulped, "the luckiest bastard."

Parker poked him. "The heaviest bastard, more like it."

Nathan mumbled, "I don't mind." But Duke slid into the not-much-of-a-space between them and made space there for himself regardless, and they rested, silent but for the harsh breathing of exertion, sweaty and exhausted, the three of them sharp but not unpleasant in Nathan's nose. Nathan thought about being lucky. It had been a tense, hard few days, but considering what he'd come out with on the other side, he wouldn't exchange it. Duke and Parker... who the hell could have seen that coming?

Duke touched Audrey's lips with his fingers. "I still wish I had your magic powers." His touch slid along the side of her jaw and tucked loose hair behind her ears.

"It's all right," Nathan said. "We can make the best of it." They both looked at him, and he added defensively, "The best was... pretty good?"

***

Duke had scooted over, manoeuvring Nathan into what he suspected was the wet spot, and they were just about dozing by the time Duke spoke.

"So what if you can't feel me." Nathan thought that his shoulder had just been prodded insistently, and he saw movement out of the corner of his eye as Duke sat up. Nathan and Audrey rolled in to fill the gap and snuggle, and Nathan shut his eyes and let Duke's outburst roll over him. "Doesn't mean there aren't all kinds of ways to manage this. It just means we have to get creative. I fuck you while you fuck Audrey. Or you do me and Audrey plays with your ass. Or we both fuck Audrey--"

Parker lifted her head, stirring Nathan, and squinted at Duke's back. "Sorry to rain on Project Sexual Fantasies, but that's one we're gonna have to work up to." She moved in what Nathan interpreted as a shrug, and he curled his arm around her and mumbled irritably for Duke to get back down and go to damn sleep. "But, you know, we can talk about it." She buried her face again and added her agreement with Nathan, "Not now."

"I thought we were having this discussion," Duke bitched.

"I don't want to have this discussion ever," Nathan complained.

"Duke, write it down in a list," Parker said, and added fiercely, "Tomorrow."

Nathan heard movement creak the bed and propped open an eye to assert, because he did have one point he wanted to be sure was made, "I can still do things without being able to feel. I can have sex." Asshole. And, "You know I don't actually need help with Audrey."

Duke had discovered his place had been claimed, and was crawling over Nathan to lie back down on the damp edge. He wriggled his hand beneath the covers somewhere Nathan couldn't feel and therefore chose to ignore.

"I don't need any help with Audrey either," Duke pointed out, intently turning Nathan's face his way, "Or you, just to make that clear. But how often do you think any of us is going to stand for being left out?"

END

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