Sea Change

There's a piece of shoreline a bit to the north-east of Haven, called Carol Point for no reason Duke's ever been able to determine. It's a treacherous, lonely line of grey-brown sand with a point like a lizard's tail snaking out and a scattering of rocks to alternatively trap or shelter depending on the mood of the sea. Ironically, it attracts a few tourists who think it's picturesque. The tide there meets from two directions and the currents can be unpredictable. At the time, it seemed as good a place as any to meet a business associate, somewhere he could be fairly confident he wouldn't run into anyone he knew. But, then, he hadn't bargained on the delays getting hold of the box that's under his arm now.

Consequently, he got back into Haven yesterday evening, slept for sixteen hours, and has barely managed to pull clothes on to drive out for the annoyingly isolated rendezvous some idiot thought it a great idea to arrange. No more than half an hour late, so far. Given how much he's paying, he should hope Dennis Desmond, whose name is in as much doubt as his good character, wants what's in the box enough to wait a half hour, even if it's cold and bleak and the wind is picking up. The weather has been a beast these last two days -- only part of the problem -- and it looks now, as Duke heads down the footpath to the beach, to be working its way up to another tantrum.

The square patch of churned-up dirt that serves as a car park for the visitor spot looks to have seen more activity recently than usual. The path down to the sea is a hive of footprints. If local kids are going to start coming out here for parties, he'll have to find some place else for this sort of thing, but Duke smiles in satisfaction as he sees there is indeed a distant figure pacing that spit of sand. He'll probably get an earful for tardiness, but maybe he'll offer to knock off a small percentage of the extra charge for all the damn hassle this box was to get here. He recalculates in his head accordingly.

Getting nearer, he winces, because his guy's not dressed for the cold, and freezing his ass off might not put him in the best of moods. Duke doesn't want to get knocked too low -- that's just letting people take advantage -- or to lift the price too high and end up with nothing, or yet another problem. Not on top of what's already been a dog of a job.

The guy is also not casting his glance back inland, impatiently, as he would for a late arrival, nor really acting like he expects someone else at all. His attention is fixed out to sea, watching the surge of the waves and the conflicting antics of a rather low high tide that's just on its turn. He acts like there's nothing in the world but studying the steady embrace of sea and sand.

Something's wrong. Duke's instincts and his intellect concur. The type of people he meets don't just stand around in the freezing cold like they don't give a damn when their appointments aren't being kept in timely fashion. And this guy -- Duke decides, as a fiercely icy blast of wind hits and he doesn't even stir -- this guy has no nerves--

It clicks. Shit-fuck-goddamnit, Duke thinks, and is about to turn on his heel and walk back just as swiftly and unobtrusively as he can when some small sound gives away his presence and the other man turns around.

It's Nathan Wuornos, who has a police badge and gun at his belt, and Duke's shitty week is complete.

They stare at each other. Nathan looks, if anything, caught unaware. What he's not doing is going straight for the gun and badge, which confuses the hell out of Duke because why else could Nate be there? He's been after a reason to arrest Duke's ass for years, and here he's walked straight up with it tucked handily under his arm. He can only imagine they've already picked up his contact, somehow, and that must mean terrier-determined Detective Wuornos finally has all the evidence he needs to throw Duke in jail for real: number of years dependent on the exciting (and yes, unknown) question of what's in the box?

When Nathan says, "What're you doing here?" Duke's convinced it's a cruel game. On that ridiculous poker face, that he's always suspected comes from an incapacity to frame more complex expressions, how the hell would he ever tell?

Fortunately he manages to keep a lid on his panic and respond, warily, with an echo. "No, Nathan, what are you doing here?"

Nathan scowls. "What the hell do you think?"

Duke knows what he thinks, but this is weird. If what he thinks isn't what Nathan thinks, the only thing that can convict him is his own mouth. "I... don't know?"

Nathan returns an are-you-kidding? stare, then his expression clears a bit. "Been out of town?"

"...Yes. As a matter of fact, yes."

Nathan nods and turns back to the sea, abruptly losing interest. Considering Duke is here, and hella suspicious and even has a very suspicious box under his arm, which he's trying to hide as best he can, Wuornos must be majorly distracted. Duke could even walk away right now and probably wouldn't be noticed. Except... "What the hell, Nate? Are you even going to tell me? Something happened?"

"Missing kid." Nathan turns again, fixing him with a clear, serious gaze. "Mother with him, said he was dragged right from her hand and under the ocean. Been looking two, three days. Boats out, people combing miles of beach for any trace. Nothing at all."

"How old?" Duke asks, sickened.

"Six." Nathan kicks the sand as he walks alongside the lapping tide. "Dead, now. No body found, but... " He nods, to himself. Duke can see the point. There isn't really any hope. He falls in half a step behind his old friend.

"If the search has been stopped, what are you still doing out here?" And, aw, shit, Duke realises something else. "Where's your car, Nate? Where's your coat?" He's not worried about Nathan Wuornos. He's not. It's just that the light jacket the man's wearing is really more a thick shirt and it's making him feel cold.

He gets a vague answer. "It didn't seem important at the time. Parker said take a walk, clear my head. Ended up here."

So, Nathan's been driving his FBI agent crazy with this, Duke deduces. Kids are a Thing with Nathan; he's super-protective. Duke doesn't have any hang-ups of the sort, but he can't even imagine working on shit like this, day in, day out. He thinks -- four miles to the police station, give or take. "You know Audrey's gonna clobber you, right?"

"She's not my keeper." A stir of the familiar, irritated Nate.

"I know she'll clobber me if I don't drive you back."

More than a stir, this time. "Who said I need assistance from you? What are you doing here, Crocker? You didn't come to gawk." His eyes zero in on the box under Duke's arm.

But Duke's had time enough to prepare his defences, now. Nathan doesn't know shit, and Dennis Desmond, or whatever the hell his name really is, has been scared off by the public attention on this place. All Duke has to do is call and rearrange, and not give Haven P.D. any ammunition to use against him in the meantime. "Sure," he says easily, with a broad smirk. "Dead kids are fun for me, remember? Think I'll go home and drown some puppies. Surely you haven't forgotten that's what I do?"

"Hey," Nathan snaps, stopping and laying a hand on Duke's arm, fingers gripping -- Duke almost thinks he can feel the chill of them penetrate his thick overcoat and layers of sweaters. "I know you're full of shi--"

He's looking right at Nathan when it happens, but even so he's not completely sure what he sees. They're close enough to the water for it to have been lapping over Nathan's boots -- not like he cares if he gets wet feet, after all -- and Nathan suddenly drops, sideways and down, whisked away by some unseen force. His startled face and clutching hands disappear beneath the waves, and it's so fast, and so surreal, that he's gone, and neither of them has even made a sound.

Nathan's gone, just a vanishing disturbance on the swelling surface of the ocean.

He can't feel, so Nathan doesn't feel what grabs him, doesn't even have that much of a clue that it's happening. But he knows that the world jerks sideways and then he's trying to breathe salt water. Swallows a big gulp of it finding out. He tries to open his eyes, to at least see what's going on, but the water is dark with mud and silt. He shuts his eyes, having learned to be protective of his sight, though he doesn't feel the sting. Tries to fight back, cast upwards for the surface with all the strength of both his arms and -- one leg: yes, the pull is on his right ankle, which won't respond to his efforts. As he strikes out, his left arm hits an obstruction in the water, and then he can't move that, either. He's caught up on something, under the surface of the sea. He can't free himself, but nor can whatever's trying to pull him down make any headway. The strain of his lungs doesn't cause him pain, but there's a spiralling dizziness threatening his consciousness.

It's hard to tell through numb senses, in the dark, but he thinks something else is tugging at him: his right arm, his chest. He can't feel the touch, but is aware to a degree when movement affects his body. Almost as soon as he realises, it stops. Then, with his thoughts threatening to scatter, he finds a breath of air pushed into his mouth, full of unexpected tastes. Mint toothpaste, some kind of spice, salt... well, everything tastes of salt, that's a given... and behind all the rest, something else, both familiar and unfamiliar.

There's only one answer. Someone just covered his mouth with theirs, and breathed for him. Someone who wants him to stay alive. Renewed, he struggles. Kicks at whatever's caught hold of his right leg with his left, using all the force he can bring to bear. Hard to gauge it, because being underwater only confuses further the issue of not being able to feel anything, and he could be kicking his own ankle, or nothing at all for all he knows. He thinks of the gun at his hip. He flails his arm, but can't get to it, can't find its unfelt shape among all the other signals. Admits to himself he'd be as likely to shoot himself in the leg.

Another breath full of air is pressed through his lips, registered as taste and the ghost of pressure that shifts his head back, with the cold details that are all he has of sensation, and he starts on the sideways track of thinking about warmth -- body heat. Drowning isn't the only danger, and he'd be even less aware of this one before it killed him. He kicks again, more fiercely, inadvertently letting most of the loaned air escape his mouth with the effort.

But he continues. It's a bizarre struggle, fought out in a state of near-total sensory deprivation, in the dark of the silty water with nothing but its rush in his ears, the only information that comes through crystal clear being the sharpness of the flavours when someone else breathes for him, each time they come back. He counts the second-hand breaths into double figures and loses count, and it seems to him it's been too long, and he knows his limbs are getting tired, becoming harder to move. He doesn't know why whoever's out there doesn't give up. They, presumably, can feel the cold, the strain, the agonies of the sea that he's numb to.

Then, in an instant, the pull on his leg releases. He jerks upwards -- his body wants to rise, and maybe his helper's adding to the pull -- and stops in another jerk. His arm is still caught up. It's saved him thus far, but there's a taste of blood in the salt water he gulps. Faint, diluted many parts, but he must be bleeding badly now, if he can taste it at all.

Then he's free, and they rise up to the surface... because he knows he's not doing all of this by himself. The best part of his energy ran out a few minutes ago, and what movements he makes now are sluggish. They break the skin of the smothering ocean and the world rushes back in again. Nathan, blinking, can see, hear, smell again, and for an instant it's a cacophonous overload. He chokes sea water. Blinks at Duke.

...Shit.

Well, there weren't really any other likely candidates for his unseen rescuer: Duke Crocker, sporting the look of a drowned rat, black hair slicked to his skull and slithered around his neck and collarbone in untidy tails. Panting for breath, skin chalk-white from the cold. His arms are around Nathan's chest like an embrace. If he hadn't nearly died, this would be embarrassing.

They aren't home free yet, he thinks, and finds enough energy to shrug off the limpet-grip -- most of it -- and strike for the shore, though his left arm isn't responding. Duke's a better swimmer under the best of circumstances, and is climbing the slope of the sand first, pulling Nathan onward by his right arm, then they're both collapsing on the beach.

Except they can't stop here. It, whatever that was, snatched him from the water's edge before, and neither of them is up to doing this again. Nathan, somehow, gets his feet back under him and tugs, kicks and otherwise harries Duke until they're both half-crawling to the top of the beach. Not until they hit the scrubby grass and a reasonable assumption of safety does he let them stop.

Duke collapses again, chest rising and falling to an absurd degree and a painful whine accompanying his breath. Nathan realises he sounds much the same. He can't feel his shivers but they started as soon as his skin hit the air. Duke's shivering, too.

Nathan checks his physical status reflexively. There's blood all down his left arm and on his ankle, but he doesn't have the energy to investigate further. He wheezes, and enjoys the taste of the air, and even basks in the oddness of the lingering tastes of Duke on his tongue, which -- who -- just saved his life.

It's a thought he wouldn't know what to do with, so it's just as well he's not up to processing anything complex right now.

"How long?" gulps Nathan finally.

"A century?" Duke doesn't even know, and nor should he know why he just fought so hard to save Nathan Wuornos' life, when it's not as if he'll get a thank you or even a civil word as return for it. He flips open his phone. It's a write-off. "Persistent bastard, whatever the hell it was." Lucky for you, he thinks silently, that so am I.

"'It'? 'Whatever'? You saw?"

"I saw some sort of... appendage." He doesn't want to use the word tentacle. "Grey flesh. Lots of teeth. Look at your foot." Nathan's right boot is gone, and the sock underneath more holes than sock. A perfect circle of tooth marks score the side of his ankle. A messier mass of punctures and tears show where the toothy grip shifted, when it was trying to pull and keep hold.

"We have sea monsters?" More dismay than disbelief, and Duke's guessing another death-thrash for the detective's hopes of a rational world.

"Silt and mud monsters, surely," Duke suggests, "if it feeds at the shoreline." It doesn't seem to lessen the blow to Nathan, who observes the utter mess of his ankle with a contrasting detachment, then one-handedly yanks off his left boot, pours out the water, swaps the sock to his right foot, and puts the boot back on his left. Duke presumes that this exercise is to prevent more dirt and sand from getting in the wounds, but the potential for infection already has to be horrific. He is, honest to God, actually glad right now that Nathan can't feel. His arm, where it caught on that wooden spar sticking up from the old jetty, is torn open in two places, and Duke can't bring himself to look at it straight now, but certainly when they first came out of the water he could see white bone in there. The agony a regular person would be in would be staggering. He's also concerned that the cold is having a slowing action on the blood loss and they're going to have a real problem when Nathan starts to warm up.

...Which isn't going to happen here, in wet clothes, with the winds whipping colder, where Duke can already feel his own body starting to set. Freezing to death isn't any better an option. Duke lurches upright. "We need to get back to my truck." Almost drunkenly, he makes a couple of grabs for Wuornos, but his body's not co-operating. "We need to get you to a hospital."

Nathan, who has argued vehemently in the face of such statements in the past, today looks at his arm and just nods, rolling upwards in a motion lacking any grace whatsoever and only not finishing on his face because Duke sets his feet and grabs on hard. Hell, they're a mess. "Hospital," Nathan says, and lumbers along, half-supported, though Duke suspects he wouldn't be on his own feet without Nathan to lean on, either, "then need to... deal with that thing. Cordon off the beach, post danger warnings, at least."

"Officer Parker, right," Duke semi-suggests, not really seeing Nathan walking out of hospital and back onto this case, and wishing either of them had a working cellphone left to call Audrey. He could do with some of her sanity, bluntness and wacky intuition now. He could do with a couple of ambulances so he doesn't have to drive them to the hospital in this state. But he'd settle for Audrey. She's useful as a buffer between him and Nathan, and there's way too little right now between them.

He has blankets in the back of his truck, enabling them both to shed their wet clothes and dry off and wrap up. He puts the heater on full and climbs over to attack Nathan's arm with the fucking inadequate strips of bandaging and gauze he has in his emergency aid kit. He doesn't take too much time, because the priority has got to be getting the injury into the hands of people who can do a much better job, but Nathan's already bleeding worse, and damn. "Put pressure on that." Duke scrambles behind the wheel and hits the gas.

"I know." The kicker is watching Nathan sitting holding his arm together and looking -- okay, slightly spacey, because there's still the blood loss and near-drowning -- but looking pretty indifferent to it. Mildly irritated, perhaps. When Duke was a kid, he used to think that was awesome, but kids are sick little bastards, and these days, he knows it means Nathan can drop dead without even knowing it's happening. Nathan, who the world doesn't touch, is unimpressed by the discomfort, even by the pain, and for the next ten minutes, Duke doesn't feel the chill or the damp either as he winds down the roads back to Haven at speeds his passenger might actually be enough of an ass to arrest him for, if he remembers it later.

They screech to a halt outside the hospital and Duke unloads his, well, load. Anyone else wouldn't still be moving under their own steam. Maybe he shouldn't be letting Nathan, but seriously, that particular fight is one Duke's not going to bother with. The first doctor they run into knows Nathan by name, and with the ease of long practice dealing with the Wuornos stubborn streak, takes him off Duke's hands. A joke about frequent customer discount falls flat.

Some while later, still wearing just damp, squeezed-out underwear, his boots, and a blanket, Duke finds a phone and rings Parker. Whose number he got from the doctors, who it seems have a ready list of People To Call When Det. Wuornos Gets Himself Hospitalised, Again.

...Correction, he tries to ring Parker. He can't get an answer. When he tries the general number of the station, he can't get an answer on that, either.

Now that, his tired, sluggish, waterlogged and half-frozen brain pulls up as he sags into a plastic chair by the telephone. That is strange.

It takes about an hour and a half for Dr DeRoss to get Nathan's shoulder scanned, pick the chips of bone out of it, and stitch the soft tissues back together. Nathan sits with his flesh opened to the bone on zero anaesthetics, for most of the process chatting somewhat surreally about their shared passion for golf, and feels faintly woozy but nothing else. When it's done, DeRoss's nurse, Marlena McReddy, cleans and dresses the wounds on his ankle. With those, they're less concerned about the severity of the relatively shallow punctures than they are with the unknown organism that caused them and subsequent possibility of toxins and infection. Samples of his blood are being rushed through their labs even now.

As he lies on the table, part of his attention is still back there, in the dark blank just beneath the ocean's surface. He thinks of little Jimmy Conlon, whose last living thoughts were of that dark, and because he could feel, that awful cold. Even though Nathan doesn't feel the cold and his body's been long warmed up by now, he shivers, involuntarily, and is scolded by Nurse Marlena for it.

No child should have to die like that. He doesn't know what kind of Trouble this is, but it has to be one, and he needs to stop it before it claims anyone else.

His left arm has been strapped so securely to his chest he's not sure he could even manage to cut it free one-handed, which he suspects is the point. "You come back tomorrow," Marlena says, very firmly. "You do not touch the bandage. You get your blood work -- and we'll call on your home phone if anything crops up that needs to be handled more urgently, so be there. You take your antibiotics. And don't even ask it, there is nobody at this hospital who will sign you fit for work anytime shy of next week."

He looks up at her from beneath a quirked eyebrow and asks if he can have his phone call, now. Which is a joke, because he's already tried Parker twice

She whaps the side of his head. "For the blood loss, go feed yourself a heap of rich food. All of you'll feel better for it, you human washboard."

Duke laughs. Duke is in the doorway, with his hair wild but dry, normal again in a clean set of clothes, holding another set over his arm and dangling a pair of shoes from his fingers.

"Why--" Nathan starts. Duke is here. One, he thought the crook had cleared off, probably to lie low awhile and hope the circumstances of his presence on the beach with that box would be forgotten. Two, Nathan can still taste Duke if he shuts his eyes and stops his ears, even through the two absurdly-sugared coffees pressed on him since arriving here, and what's weirdest is he's actually done that a few times, just to prompt that memory. Not because of much to do with Duke, that he can guarantee, but ironically it represents by far the most intimacy he's had with another human being for a long time. Which is sad, when you think about it, because it's Duke. The shared experience is too close behind them, snapping at his heels. He'd have preferred to have some space without being reminded of it.

"Something you need to see," Duke says. His eyes dart to the nurse, then flee from her disapproving frown.

"I hope by that you mean you've come to take him home and make sure he stays there."

No, Duke hasn't, and for that reason Nathan can be fucking delighted that Duke is there. Maybe he can explain why Parker's not answering her calls.

"You haven't changed one bit since kindergarten," Marlena says to them both, making Nathan wince and Duke just grin. But she leaves the room to let Nathan dress. He begins slowly, clumsily, knocking Duke's hand away when he tries to help. A moment later, it registers that Duke is rushing him; it's not so much lack of conviction he can do it himself, but that he can do it fast enough for the other man's satisfaction. What's happened and what the hell does he need to see so badly? Sufficiently concerned to go along with it, Nathan makes a point of pulling on and fastening his own pants, then nods and lets Duke help with shirt, jacket and shoes. As clever, long fingers fasten a line of buttons, a fingertip brushes skin; with excess care, the same fingers curl around his injured ankle, easing on a borrowed right shoe. Nathan only notices these things with his eyes. He's been told a few times in the last two hours that, at the moment, the fact he can't feel makes him lucky.

His gun and his badge he stuffs in the loose side of the borrowed jacket for now. He lacks the one-handed dexterity to return them to their customary positions, and has no intention to let Duke touch them, nor anything else beneath his belt. The crooked bastard knows it, too, and Nathan follows that crooked grin out of the hospital. It's turned his way pretty constantly, checking he's still there. He walks carefully but steady, hoping not to cause further damage to his injured foot.

Duke swings into the front of his truck. Nathan has to climb in the passenger side with more care and deliberation. Not having pain to contend with, it's not like being a machine -- his body remains abused and aware of it, resisting him at the moment. The truck sets off before he can fasten his seatbelt. "See," Duke says, "I was going to foist you off on Audrey, because I am not the Duke Crocker Institute For Babysitting Injured Hardasses. Only I can't get in touch with her, and I can't get in touch with the station. So, even though for me you know full well this is going above and beyond, I then drove past the station to find out what's going on, and I found-- well, you can see for yourself in a minute." With the way Duke is driving, it's a short one.

The police station's grand old frontage is painted pale pink. It says, on a sign by the slightly darker, mayhap even Barbie-hued door, 'Megan Moston's School of Dance'.

Nathan and Duke sit and gape awhile, even though Duke, presumably, has seen it before. "That's, uh, that's from a series of children's books, isn't it?" Nathan asks blankly, and they sit a while longer, neither able to quite bring words to the fore. They're shaken out of it when a phone rings.

"New phone already?" Nathan asks.

"So I'm well-prepared with a few spares."

It's Parker, speaking so high and loud Nathan can hear her clearly from the passenger seat. "I get the sense from your seven messages that you're trying to contact me? Is the world ending? Can it wait? I have a situation here."

"We're, uh, outside the police station," Duke starts.

"Don't come in!" she yelps instantly. "I mean, there's... tutus and... people... people I know... twisting into insanely bendy shapes. I don't think my eyes could stand either of you associated with tutus, and we're already going to have a rash of spinal injuries when this is over, so I do not want to find out what this Trouble does to Nathan."

"Parker?" Nathan barks across.

"Six year old," she expands reluctantly. "Ballerina fixation. Just... don't ask."

"Well, I did, but now I'm regretting it."

"What about the, uh, the rest of the cops?" Duke prompts. "I mean, not to be greedy, I do already have one, but he's down a wing and we could really use more badge-wielding power."

"Who is that advocating increased police presence and am I supposed to believe it's Duke Crocker?" Parker demands, clearly not wholly in jest. "Is Nathan alright?"

"I'm fine--"

"Carol Point," Duke expels, talking over him in a reluctant burst. "There's something in the water. Nathan... found it. It got away, so, you know, public to arrest, monsters to protect, or whatever way around you do this."

A short silence. "There's... really not anyone who's in a position to help."

"...The Chief?" Nathan chokes. Some of the mental images zinging off the big honking obtrusion of the pink public building are not ones he's going to get to grips with short of intensive therapy.

"Just don't, Nathan. Suffice to say I hope this is one of those Haven Events that leaves everyone's memories helpfully vague at the end. Look, I really have to go. Duke, I owe you one for sticking around and backing Nathan up on this."

Nathan jolts straight in his seat, opens his mouth to protest vigorously, and realises she's gone and Duke's folding the phone away. There's a trace of annoyance in his face, too, though the source of it is more ambiguous. Parker might have a point, Nathan concedes, because he's not sure he can even drive, so he closes his mouth and stews in it belligerently. Duke pinches himself and rubs his eyes a few times, but obviously fails to make the police station return to normal.

"Okay," he says. "I have to say it. I am sure that somewhere in there, even you are thinking it. The two of us lucked out completely when we drew 'killer sea monster' from the barrel of today's freakish fun options."

Outside, it's darkening like the end of the world. The sky is the same deep grey-green of the ocean depths that almost claimed them earlier, and big, slow raindrops are starting to speck the windscreen. Nathan says hoarsely, "I have a spare radio and some cordon tape in my truck. Round the corner, outside Harper's."

"Are you deputising me, Nathan?"

He doesn't choose to answer, but since Nathan's the only member of Haven P.D. who's not totally indisposed at the moment, and he's barely mobile, it's got to be as good as, Duke figures. It amuses the hell out of him, considering he was very definitely breaking the law this morning and Detective Wuornos almost certainly knows it, and they both know a few other of the choicest insults and promises Nathan's slung his way over the years. Duke's entertainment lasts until he pulls up around the corner and watches Nathan walk across to his blue Ford Bronco truck like he's made of glass. There's no wincing, no pain or hesitation from the expectation of it, but he genuinely doesn't know what fresh damage he's doing to his body with each movement.

Duke wonders what the doctors actually said about that shoulder and foot, and if he should have pressed them or paid more attention back at the hospital. He has to remind himself that he doesn't care, and with good reason, because Nathan burned all his bridges with Duke some time ago.

Nathan gets into the Bronco, and it's funny how there's no other word for it but painfully, roots around and then reappears with a few things under his arm. He kicks the door shut, then has an oh-shit moment when he realises which foot he used, and Duke can't help it, it is fucking well funny. Nathan strides back, forgetting to be careful, glowering, and tucks the stuff under his chin, this time, to open Duke's passenger door and let himself back in. He chucks the tape roll and the radio on the dashboard and struggles once more into the passenger seat. The spots of rain on his clothes, on his face, are all points he is oblivious to and the dead-fish colour of his complexion is hardly encouraging.

"Lobster Pup or Sloppy Jane's?" Duke prompts abruptly, figuring it's past time they followed doctor's orders.

Nathan grunts, hostilely, and he's right, Duke does already know the answer to that. He drives to the less brain-mangling of the fast food options down the street.

His stomach growls at him increasingly on the way. It's something ridiculous like twenty-four hours since he last had a square meal himself, but he's not thought about it before, between the sleeping and the rushing and the near-death. Jane's doesn't really count as a square meal either, but Duke's philosophy is that a man has to eat a hamburger every now and then. If nothing else, to remind him that the world has an infinite variety of other tastes, all of them preferable.

They don't take their coats off inside Jane's, though it's heated like a furnace. The cold of the sea has sunk into Duke's bones, deep enough that he wonders if he'll get it out again. He'll never drive out the memory of those long minutes of effort and endurance as he fought to save a life. If the life he saved looks indifferent to it all, he knew that was part of the territory beforehand. But it's definitely going to be weird looking at Nathan Wuornos walking around and thinking, I did that, for the rest of his life. Hopefully it wears off soon.

Nathan can't feel the cold, or the exertion, the burn of tired, chilled muscles. It must be a patchy picture of an existence. Duke aches, but he's not injured, so doesn't get to complain. He saved the ungrateful ass who can't feel it anyway, who probably has no idea how bad it was. How do you even process the world in such a void of information?

He sounds bitter even to himself, so stops. Jane is on the counter, with her big head of grey, curly hair that you're almost guaranteed to find one of as a freebie in your order. She mocks him, what with a new restaurant to his name and all, for gracing her establishment, and acerbically comments on the damp notes he uses to pay her. He swears that the burger she serves him is twice as greasy and soggy as everyone else's. When he finally turns away from the counter, he spies Nathan standing in the doorway, paused and mechanically chewing on his Giant Double Cowburger as he contemplates the outside.

Where it's raining like the frickin' Biblical flood.

Duke stops next to Nathan and stares at the sheets of water bleeding down from the sky, which is almost as black as night, now, with heavy, vengeful clouds. It's making a dull roar so consistent he didn't notice it over the radio and the grating sound of Jane's voice. He's glad he's not still out at sea. He watched all the indications the weather was set to change again on the way back in, but didn't expect a downpour like this. A day longer of delay, and maybe... he imagines himself being dragged again down to the ocean bottom, not by mere monsters that can be fought in the shallows off the beach, but by all the might and will of the sea. Then he frets more mundanely about the Cape Rouge and her moorings.

The street outside is a river, funnelling water on past at a rapid pace. The uniform grey of the sky, the rain, and Haven's usually colourful houses make a picture as oppressive as he's ever seen. "You think this is a Trouble?" he asks, unable to keep a lid on it.

Nathan gives him a pitying look that says, You've been away too long. "It's Maine." He chews the last of his burger, and licks his fingers. Duke watches him do it and thinks, for some reason, that it looks vaguely porny. About the rain, he suspects Nathan of mainlining his own particular brand of denial. Duke hands over his alleged food without comment. Three bites seem to be his limit even when he's this hungry. At least Nathan only has to contend with the taste, and not the texture as well. That's one effect Duke's never considered before, and he muses on Nathan's potential immunity to bad food, then thinks, wait -- doesn't he claim something about amped-up remaining senses as well? If Nathan's sense of taste really is amped up, the guy must be damn hungry.

Second burger disappears about as quickly as the first, either way, and then the detective's casting a scant look back and swinging out into the new river-channel of the street, in big, loping strides. Duke hesitates before following. He theorises that Nathan's back might be more expressive than his face. They duck inside the cab of the truck again, their change of clothes making thick, wet sounds, as drenched as they were when they came out of the sea.

"Herald office," Nathan announces, like he has all the business in the world dictating where they'll go. "Teagues might know of anything like this happening before. Usually manage to be better informed than us, anyway." Us the police, that presumably means. Despite the repeat drenching, there's more colour back in his face, and he looks stubborn, less like a ghost. He shoots Duke a glance that says, What are you waiting for?

My fare, Duke doesn't say, and teases the truck into an ornery start. She doesn't like the wet. One of life's little ironies. As Nathan says; Maine. A few flickers of lightning put an unnatural glare in the sky and the rain bounces off every surface in long silver streaks like wounds. It only needs a red glow and the whole town would look like anyone's idea of Hell.

The Teagues are huddled around a heater behind their desks, locked in a weird tug-o'-war over a paisley blanket, having been out, so they tell, trying to get the perfect shot of Haven's landmarks caught in the 'Downpour of the Decade', as Vince enthusiastically asserts tomorrow's headline will be. "At least it's a change from all this sad, sad talk of dead children," he adds, more soberly. "What can I do for you, Nathan? You look like you've been in the wars."

Nathan hopes he's not going to try and find a story in that, particularly not one that goes along the lines of, Police Detective Saved By New Local Hero Duke Crocker, and he'd better be damned careful what he says about the state of the police station, too, because the town does not need to know that Haven P.D. was brought to a standstill today. Fortunate that the rain's keeping people inside, and can probably be used as an easy explain for the lack of telephone response. "Usual luck," he responds curtly. A reputation for being injury-prone means people do stop questioning for the particulars after a while, and that comes into play even now, as the seasoned newspaperman's mouth twists into a small grimace and he opts not to pry. "Need any reports from your archives about drownings or disappearances up at Carol Point. Anything about. Uh. Sea monsters?" He speaks it and cringes from it.

Dave guffaws at him. "You think we've got Haven's own Loch Ness Monster up there, Nathan? You don't think the tourist industry would have milked it 'til you couldn't get away from it, in a town like this one?"

"In a town like this one, it's remarkable what people don't talk about at all." He points to the computer. "Check?"

Vince bustles into action, abandoning the blanket. "Now you mention it, I do have a funny feeling I've seen something like that."

Dave stares like he's crazy, but takes every advantage to huddle himself tighter and inch his chair closer to the heater, bumping his brother's aside. "The hell you say! I know those archives better than you, and I know for a fact there has never--"

"Yak, yak, yak," Vince spits back, scowling. "You'll eat those words. Here we are. 1992... Henry Harman, dragged under the water, never seen again. Hm. Severed end of unknown sea creature tentacle washed up in 1996... here, there's even a photograph." He backsteps and nudges Dave, not overly gently. "Another disappearance! A girl gone in 1989, body never found."

Dave is spluttering, and as Vince keeps pulling out more names and dates, it's not hard to see why. Haven has its secrets, but they're talking a handful of lives, now, and nobody's ever put it together before?

"Getting senile," Vince accuses his brother, with manic humour that isn't altogether nice. Sometimes Nathan wonders about these two. "You forgot, you old fool."

"Can you print those?" Duke asks, gingerly moving back out of the line of fire that seems to be building up between the two Teagues.

"That'll be two dollars sixty print costs," Dave says gleefully while Vince runs them off.

"What? Police business!" Duke cries, spreading his hands in protest.

"You ain't the police," Vince snerks at him gruffly.

Duke looks at Nathan, but surely knows he needn't have bothered, and besides, Nathan turns out empty, borrowed pockets straight-faced. "Lost my wallet in the Drink."

"So," Dave prompts with abrupt cheer, and the sly glances being cast between the brothers indicate their enmity forgotten. "You boys going monster hunting?"

"Join us," Nathan invites. Teagues are a dab hand tracking and shooting, for all the bluster and bickering they bring to the party, and they frankly could use the manpower. Also, a buffer between him and Crocker would be nice, and he tells himself that if it means this morning's humiliations find their way in some shape or form into the pages of the Haven Herald, it's a comparatively small price to pay for protecting lives.

But Dave shuffles down further in the blanket like he's a small mammal trying to curl up for the winter, and Vince eyes the sheets of water still coming down outside the window. It's about three o'clock. It could be midnight. Vince shoves the handful of copies at Duke and takes his money, scowling when Duke has a few attempts at pulling it back. "I'm not as young as I used to be," he concludes, breaking Duke's grip with a force that belies his words. "Happy hunting, boys."

Following Duke out the door, Nathan turns back and sees Vince leaned in close to his brother, who's whispering something at him that's both forceful and annoyed. Nathan doesn't catch it all, but it seems they're back to the same argument. Funny thing about those two. Some days it's like they share a brain, others leave him half expecting to show up to a call out and find one's finally strangled the other.

"You're paying me back," Duke hisses, dragging his attention away, before they step off the shelter of the doorstep for a frantic dash through the roaring rain.

"Good luck with that!" Nathan yells. Thirty seconds later and much wetter for the interval as they scramble into the front of Duke's truck again, the other man finally realises and explodes, "You paid for your goddamn burger. Lost your wallet, my ass! I cannot believe you have the gall to call me a thief."

Nathan doesn't laugh, but he doesn't try to quash the tick of a smile at the corner of his mouth that he hopes will annoy the fuck out of Duke, either. Except Duke half-turns and quirks his mouth in almost a mocking echo, dragging the photocopies from the inside of his jacket. "Tel me, Nate..." He brandishes the prints, which are only mostly dry. "You were there. You heard what I heard. So... isn't there one crucial thing you noticed about the articles Vince was reeling off in there?"

Nathan is uncertain if he's waiting for an important insight or a punch line functioning mainly as a personal insult, so he just waits.

"The dates, man," Duke bursts out, exasperated, thwapping Nathan on the side of the head with the sheath of paper. "92. 96. 89. All of them years that passed by in Haven without a peep out of any of the Troubles, that we know of -- and I mean, you'd know, right?" The indicative nod and that soft look in his eyes is oddly gentle. "Either this isn't what we think it is... or... what the hell is this?"

It started out a fairly lousy day, and now Duke is trying to figure out if they've stepped into the X-files by mistake. It would be cool, he decides, if Nathan actually looked anything like Gillian Anderson. Even more so earlier, when they were locking lips. But no, instead of a cute, round and busty verbal redhead, he has to contend with a tight-lipped skin-and-bones string bean. Though to be fair, he doubts he can rate much better as Duchovny. Thank God.

If it's not a Trouble then it's... what? He keeps asking himself that, coming up empty. Hell, they all know that the Troubles are real. Every single Havenite, deep down, somewhere, has to know it. But monsters? Aliens? Ghosts and ghouls? How far do you go?

Either way, first they go to the Cape Rouge, because Duke needs some stuff, and Duke is driving. Nathan can argue and bellyache way past the point where it gets old, but the facts are, right now he's two limbs a gimp and not able to put up much resistance. It takes demanding, "Why do you never talk this much when you're not being pissy?" to get any respite at all, and the resulting sulk gnaws on Duke's nerves the rest of the way.

The rain is by far the worst part of the weather, so he lets Nathan's nagging pull him away from the storm checks of his girl faster than expected. He drags the other man below decks to his living quarters. "My driving, my rules. Suck it up," Duke states, as Nathan gets antsy again, and ransacks a drawer and chucks a towel and yet another dry change of clothes at him.

Nathan lets them hit the floor and looks at them. "It's pointless."

"Humour me." He's pretty sure Nathan mostly doesn't want to have to be helped to dress again, and for long moments he stands sullenly, watching Duke strip and redress most of the way, eyes sunken and burning either with burgeoning fever or frustration, before angrily shrugging his own damp shirt over his head and acquiescing. There are spots of blood on his strapped-up arm. Duke sneaks in and swaps out the white shirt he provided for a black one. It does remind him he's going to catch hell from Audrey for enabling Nathan's superhero complex, but seriously? If there's only one cop left in Haven, it might as well be the one who can't feel how fucked up he is.

Duke knows that so far as Nathan's concerned, the only thing his affliction is good for is to allow him to abuse his body and keep going, and knows it's an argument he's had with everyone else so it's not going to work from Duke, either -- from Duke in particular. So he doesn't go there. Hopefully Nathan knows his limits sufficiently well from what tells he has of his physical status that he won't do anything truly stupid.

Nathan turns his back again to change, a modesty which is the cutest damn thing, and contradictory as hell after he's just spacily stared at every bit of Duke -- he's obviously not firing on all cylinders, and Duke has to bite his tongue hard. Nathan's shoulder blades could cut, and there are still a couple of pock-marks on his uncovered one where punctures from the tacks got infected, but the bullet wound from the other week overshadows them impressively. His buttocks are as potentially deadly as his shoulders, and Nathan freezes, dry jeans halfway up his absurdly narrow ass, and demands, pained, "Are you laughing?"

"No. No, I... man, I'm sorry, I just have to check something. Here." While he's about it, Duke reaches around to help Nathan pull up his jeans. "Ow. Oh, my God. You do know that buttocks aren't actually supposed to come with corners?" He pats his unseen hand again briefly before bringing it around because he needs both to button the jeans. Then he sees stars as Nathan, who's really not so oblivious as all that, head-butts him in the nose and twists away, getting his own zipper, then bending carefully to put back on the same soggy Velcro-fasten trainers.

Okay, he almost certainly deserved that one.

The welfare of the Cape Rouge aside, there were two main reasons for coming back to the boat. One of them is the voluminous black fishermen's oilskins Duke retrieves before they go back above decks. The other is to make sure he's damn well better armed than Nathan. Though it's a bit nerve-racking actually showing a cop (one who likes him even less since the groping stunt) a sample of the personal protection stored aboard his boat.

"Of course, you have permits for all of these," is the dry sneer on Nathan's lips.

"Some of them, two..." Shit, this is a dangerous game. But after events up at the point earlier, after the time they've spent together today, somewhere inside Duke there's been reawakened a little, ridiculous core of optimism that still wants to believe Nathan wouldn't take him in with anything that might stick. That it's all threats and bluster, even if the very idea of accusing Nathan Wuornos of being more mouth than action is idiotic. "Dangerous out there on the open ocean, officer. Never know what or who you might run into."

"Pirates?" Nathan suggests with a snort. "Smugglers?"

"Sea monsters," counters Duke, suddenly losing his humour. His frickin' nose hurts. They have to hunt down a monster. Nathan can barely stand up -- a couple of times he's bounced off a wall, and he almost went over a step on the way down -- and Duke's not much better off himself, tiredness and exertion and chill and all that; plus, the weather outside is piss.

He grabs weapons and ammo. Nathan picks out a heavy-duty rifle to supplement his service weapon, which at least he seems to believe he can use one-handed, experimenting with his ability to do so -- and from his brief, curt comment that Duke's going to have to do the reloading, he guesses they're still allies for the moment.

Something slides across his upper lip, and he raises his hand to brush it away. There's blood. A little bit. "Wow. I cannot believe that you inflicted personal violence on me for, entirely in jest, groping your pointy butt."

Nathan says, "Warn me so I can be somewhere else if you're gonna start to cry."

The oilskins swamp them both and make them more like blimps in the darkness, and Nathan thinks that if it comes to fighting or scrambling across rocks he might have to ditch his, but he'll keep it as yet. It's not a bad idea for one of Duke's and at least now he vaguely feels like he's looking after his body. The doctors will be proud, when they've finished scolding him for the rest. The guns were a good idea, too, though usually he's not quite so keen to have Duke Crocker going armed, particularly at his back.

At his side, now, as they drive once more to Carol Point, through the blinding, relentless rain. Nathan tries the police radio again, hoping. Still nothing. Except, faintly, Tchaikovsky. He hurls it into the back of the cab with a snarl of disgust.

"We'll be laughing about this tomorrow," Duke says, then reconsiders. "Well, maybe not you."

Duke's a dick, and Nathan's not so humourless as all that. But... it's the old route, he realises, as they crest a rise that can barely be seen for the driving rain and the splashes on the windscreen and the motion of the wipers. There's a corner right after that which would've got them to the sea via the shortest route down if Duke didn't know this road so well. They both do, because they came up here on their bikes since they were old enough to ride them without training wheels. Pirates and treasure, smugglers and illicit goods, and yes, sea monsters, were all the fare of their youthful fantasies. It was a journey they shared willingly, once.

He catches Duke looking at him out of the corner of his eye, and turns away to the darkness of the passenger side window, only to find the reflection still there, still looking. And he wonders how the hell he can even be here thinking about this, after all these years and the things Duke's done to him, the multiple breaches of trust. "Stop it," he says aloud.

Duke throws up his hands, though he snatches the wheel back quickly. "You're unbelievable."

"I'm -- what, like the tacks? Grabbing my ass?" The list could go on a while, but Duke interrupts it with his perennial cry: "I was eight years old!"

"Yeah, mentally."

"...Alright, not the ass thing. But you're a priss, and it's hilarious. Except, sorry, I forgot you don't have a sense of humour either, so my bad." There's a silence because Nathan isn't going to dignify that with a reply. "What I don't get is how someone who can't feel his own damn skin gets so precious over it," Duke explodes, disgustedly.

"Because people take fucking liberties," Nathan bursts out, the same. Truly, he usually has more filters between brain and mouth. "You're the one who's been demonstrating that since we were kids." This conversation, he decides, is proof that he's tired and hurt even though he feels nothing, and it needs to stop now.

Duke shuts up, unusually obliging. The air is raw and silent between them until he pulls in to the square scrap of car park at Carol Point. "Nate." Duke turns as he cuts the engine. "That's not what I--"

Nathan is too surprised to pull back. Duke reaches out and cups his long hands either side of Nathan's face; leans in to plant his mouth over Nathan's.

Nathan probably makes some sort of noise. He doesn't know if the kiss is soft or hard, needy or confident, and he doesn't really know what Duke's tongue is doing. But he can taste the things he now associates indelibly with Duke, behind that shot of scotch sneaked back on the boat, which he thinks Nathan doesn't know about. It's entirely curiosity in the strangeness of that moment that makes him trace the source of the tastes with his tongue, means that his response is not entirely unresponsive. Though probably nearly so. Duke pulls back and Nathan's brain intrudes with some actual material analysis on what just happened.

Some part of this is not what he thought it was. What he actually thinks of it is going to have to wait.

"Like this, I'm not much of a kisser," he informs Duke, flatly. The other man seems for once lost for words, a deer-in-headlights look about him now despite being the one to initiate the kiss, though he manages to blurt, "I figured that one out." Nathan can't tear his gaze away at first, and he suspects his expression is strange. He doesn't know what he's thinking, so he certainly doesn't know what's showing in his face. What's oddest to him right now is to have that experience lifted and removed from the impenetrable darkness of the sea, away from fear and absence of anything else and the grasping nearness of death. It's probably just as well. Dwelling on the other was bound to send him a bit peculiar after a while.

"Thanks." Still no communication brain-to-mouth; the word just comes out.

Duke eyerolls frustration. "You are the weirdest--"

"For saving my life, jackass." Nathan kicks the door open, so the sound of the rain can drown them out.

"And you would decide to finally bring this up now?" Duke yells, determined to be heard above the deluge. "Oh, right, because there's so many other things we could talk about right now, of course this is when you decide you're finally gonna get cute about earlier."

"Can we concentrate on the thing?" Nathan shouts back. The weight of the rain hitting the waterproof makes it an effort to walk, like he's suddenly carrying half again his body weight. He's not specifically trying to mess with Duke, because at least that was honest, or he thinks it was and is going to continue to assume it is, because there's always going to be that area of doubt, with Duke: though this might throw new light on some of those previous doubts. But it's really not the time to get so complicated. He doesn't know how long his body can keep going. There is, too, the question of why Duke would even bother to put the moves on him, when he knows he's not easy and fun and those are the two things dominating all of Duke's chosen relationships, so far as he can see. And he can't. He can't. He thought Duke knew that, from the insults. Though it strikes him, now the subject comes up, that it might be easier to do something in the role of catcher than pitcher, but the wave of annoyance that arrives with that thought isn't helpful to anyone.

At least they're not arguing anymore.

They descend the steps into the more sheltered cove, from where they'll have to walk around to the point. The tide is halfway out, the stretch of sand looking different from earlier. The rocks are exposed at the tip of the spit.

"That profile look different to you?" Duke shouts. It's the first thing he's said since up at the truck.

Nathan squints into the distance, where it's hard to see much of anything. The line of rocks seem to shift and distort, becoming more so, more upright, more threatening. He thinks for a moment that they don't match his memory of it, and then he shakes his head and, somehow, they do.

"No..." he says, uncertainly. But it's half-habit that he opted for that answer, from years of disagreeing with Duke. As he squints at the shape of the rocks again, he thinks he could as easily have said yes. It doesn't matter. He's fairly sure Duke knows what he means.

Something weird is going on. All right, that's almost a redundant statement in these parts, but all of this isn't what it seems, either. Maybe this isn't about a sea monster, after all.

He's still thinking like that when he steps on the tentacle.

"God fucking damn it, if you can't feel what you're standing on, at least look where you're walking!" Overly harsh and earning him Nathan's admittedly-rather-immovable scowl, but they're both still breathing hard from the sudden panic, and his ears are ringing from the flurry of shots they loosed into the tentacle and the sand. Nathan rests his rifle on a rock. He slides his hand into a pocket where it scuffles a bit and comes out covered by an evidence bag, bends down carefully to pick up the tentacle, exposing the ring of teeth and the red, circular mouth on the underside. The rain has washed the severed end, leaving pinkish-grey, stringy fibres.

"It's not going to fit in the bag," Duke states.

"Thing bit me. Might be useful if Eleanor has a sample." He plops it on the rock and pulls out a knife, which he draws with the aid of his teeth, nods at the thing. "Hold that steady."

"I am not touching that."

"Fine." Nathan slaps the knife through it in one motion, managing a mostly-clean cut, and saws untidily at a few stringy tethers left behind. He puts the knife away and painstakingly turns the bag inside-out over the just-about-small-enough mouth end of the tentacle. He seals the bag and tucks it in his jacket. Duke shudders.

"How are you this squeamish?" Asshole.

"Hey! I am not and never will be a serving member of Haven Police Department, for whom the weird, the bad and the ugly is the bread and butter of routine -- and I'm not even talking about the actual cops, yet."

That earns him an eyeroll. Doesn't he feel special? He swears, Nathan Wuornos will be the death of him. The man pushes him just far enough to make him react, overstepping his bounds, and -- well, usually he reacts with an insult. He supposes he couldn't very well predict how Nate would respond to having a tongue stuck down his throat. The minor miracle is he didn't haul back and deck him just as hard as a man can who doesn't care about breaking his hand. Should that count as an unexpected win? Duke's already building up scenarios he can use to brush it off as temporary insanity later. Which it was. Is. Only it was temporary insanity brought on by the guy saying a thing like that and him realising how much he's been fucking with Nathan for how long, and what that probably did look like from the other side. Fuck.

He has to keep his mouth the hell shut while he reloads Nathan's gun for him, thinking if he says much else, he won't be able to pull that back later.

There's a sort of sagging hole where the tentacle they just shot up came out of the ground under a rock. It doesn't look like there's anything else there now. Duke braces himself and kicks the rock over. Nathan swings the rifle down but, nope, nothing there.

"A tentacle washed up in that news story," Duke says. "There was one down at the high tide line, over there. No way this is the same one, right? How big is this thing?"

"Too big." Nathan picks up and carries the thought forward. "Troubled are people. When the Troubles go away, they go."

"This thing can't have started out human. So tell me, Agent Wuornos, is this an honest-to-God X-file?"

"No," Nathan asserts absolutely. Why, oh why, thinks Duke, can't he be as small, red-haired and busty as he ought to be, saying things like that when they're on the track of sea monsters? "There's a cave over there. Careful where you step."

"That's some advice, from the guy who managed to step on a tentacle now not once, but twice. I thought you had sharp eyes?"

"Shut up, Duke." Nathan says it almost absently. "If this thing has ears, it's probably planning its evening menu already."

That's... a good point. Duke grips his gun tightly and picks his way across the top of the rocks, avoiding the crevices and tide pools -- or rain pools, as they're as likely to be -- in between. He sees something grey moving, once or twice, and tries to signal it to Nathan, though cop-hand-semaphore isn't his strong point. Nathan squints at him and waves him onward. Either he thinks they're better off focusing on whatever's at the centre or he has no frigging clue what Duke's waving his hands around about.

Comforting.

Nathan pauses and frowns at the cave in front of them. He starts to pick his way closer to Duke again, who obliges by doing the same. They perch together on a large rock. Nathan puts his mouth by Duke's ear and says, "That cave, you know it?"

"I don't..." But, no, he sort of does. It's in his memory, sure. This cave, it's always been here. Who wouldn't know that? Except, when he thinks about it, he and Nate played on the sands at Carol Point when they were kids. Rode their bikes up as the tide was heading out and lost hours here on the rocks. Pirates, smugglers, treasure-hunters, and no objections from Nathan Wuornos about playing a rogue back then. He remembers it clear and crisp, escaping his dad to have the best damn times of their lives, and he knows a cave like this would've been irresistible to those two crazy boys. "This wasn't here before, but I remember it. What the hell is that?"

They look at each other. Nathan says softly, "If this had been here when we were kids, it would have been ours." It's more than Duke usually gets, the acknowledgement that they were friends once, but he's too busy thinking what the fuck? to make the most of it.

"This is a Trouble."

Nathan nods.

"So someone, what, made a monster? That's messed up." He's forgotten to be quiet about it, but Nathan seems to have forgotten to care.

"Actually, I'm pretty relieved knowing it didn't use to be anyone," he admits, adjusting his grip on the rifle.

...Shit. This town, thinks Duke.

The cave seems to beckon like the perfect smuggler's cave, like the promise of adventure, not quite real, more like a pure thing filtered of imagination from every pirate story book ever, the concentrated aura of what a cave should be. He bets there's even that glowing algae inside, the kind you don't see in real life when you don't have a torch, because unlike fiction, reality doesn't come that convenient.

"This... this is crazy."

"Tell me about it." They pick their way around to the furthest edge of the cave mouth. The rocks there are bigger, more of a buffer to stand on, since the tentacles seem to burrow through loose sand.

Some of the rocks aren't rocks.

Duke's not even sure if they can see the body of the thing yet, or if that's just how thick the tentacles are when you're up close to it. Nathan, panic alive in his eyes, grabs Duke's arm and jerks his head back the way they've come. Hefts his gun; shakes his head. Guns aren't going to work.

That's... just fine, actually. Duke plants his feet and takes off his backpack while Nathan stares. Well-wrapped in oilskin and plastic layers that take some getting out of is a bundle of spare ammunition, a couple of smaller guns, and... something else he sneaked in when the Officer of the Law wasn't looking.

"You brought explosives?" Nathan splutters.

"...Because I was incredibly forward-thinking," Duke fills in.

Their retreat from the area is a lot swifter than their sneak up to it. When the dynamite detonates behind them in the cave mouth, the rocks shift and sand and water spray up in a dozen places around them as buried tentacles convulse. The whole ground trembles underfoot, knocking over Nathan, who can't adequately adjust his balance to compensate. Duke hauls him up and onwards, not really any thoughts to spare for unseen injuries or exacerbating existing ones. A moment later, he's dropping and covering his head as half the cliff comes down behind them. Nathan sort of half-ducks and then looks back and watches, the crazy fucker.

"We just changed the shape of the shoreline."

"As long as that thing was under it!" He tells himself it's a manly squeak in his voice.

"Can't really argue that reasoning."

Neither of them can quite believe what just happened, and the air is charged with that. It makes the other crazy stuff stirred up by the day pale in comparison, and Duke thinks after this, maybe he won't have to make up excuses to explain the damned kiss after all. It'll just disappear, insignificant beneath the avalanche of weird, and that will be that. Back to sniping, biting and half-hating.

Then Nathan offers a hand to help him up, and he realises it's irrelevant. Maybe it's a start. Maybe it's a peace offering. Maybe Nathan's too tired to care. Duke still has no idea where he stands anymore.

Nathan wakes up naked in Duke's bed and supposes at least the day can't deteriorate much further from there.

The bandages on his arm have been redone. The one on his foot has been cut off and the skin's puffy and swollen where it was. If he could feel, he'd probably feel like crap. As it is, he props himself semi-upright, waits for the room to stop spinning, and swallows the antibiotics waiting with a glass of water at the side of the bed. He finds his badge and gun and wallet there with them. What he doesn't find is any clothes.

He vaguely recollects that something similar happened to Parker and it boggles his mind that Duke could be working on both of them.

Pain or not, he can't be sure that if he stands up he won't fall over again, so he works up to it slowly. Upright finally, he wraps a sheet around himself, slips his badge into a fold of the bandages, grabs his gun, and goes in search of Duke, being careful of how he places his right foot.

Morning, from the light and the scent of the day as he comes out on deck. The bad weather has broken, leaving it mild with that fresh, new after-rain cleanliness in the air. Duke's sitting in a chair on deck with his expression a million miles away, drinking tea. His eyes clear and sharpen as he registers Nathan walk into his vision, put his gun down on the tea tray, and sit opposite, rearranging the sheet self-consciously around his knees.

"Morning," says Duke, whose smile is also more self-conscious than Nathan remembers seeing it before, though it morphs into a familiar amused insincerity. "I would have left out clothes, but figured you already ruined enough of mine."

"I am not Parker."

"No." The flat statement earns him a morose headshake. "You could at least be Gillian Anderson, though. Know that I resent you for that."

"What?" Okay, he's talking to Duke. The non-sequiturs are a given. He's out of sorts, or wouldn't have reacted at all. He eyeballs the other man pointedly.

"You passed out, after I told Audrey I'd see you home safely. Now, I considered dumping you on your doorstep like that, in sodden clothes, bleeding... but I decided Agent Parker scares me a whole lot more than you do. Sorry."

He has a feeling Parker is going to find this hilarious, but yesterday's still haunting him and today is going to be the whole pain in the ass of going back to the hospital, and having to be signed off work for an indeterminate period, and somehow explaining all of this to the Chief, all those irritancies looming large. It seems to his slow-turning mind just now that he can either shoot Duke or let it go, because there's nothing else he has enough energy to do, and if he shoots Duke he'll have to do the paperwork afterwards to justify it, so... his options dwindle to one.

Duke clears his throat. "You're being surprisingly unreactive about all this." Surprisingly? Is that really Duke passing up a 'robot' slur? Nathan squints. "You feeling alright?"

"Funny. That's what I was going to ask... hell, you know what I mean."

Nathan hazards, "I think I'm okay." Doctors are gonna have his ass. "I don't remember... we talked to Parker last night?" But it's coming back as he thinks it over, though everything after the running and the explosion is a bit of a haze. He probably started something bleeding again, that point where he fell. He does recall staggering against Duke's shoulder back to the truck, and being driven back to the police station, which thankfully looked like the police station again.

He has a vague memory of spotting the Chief, who wouldn't meet his eye and hurried away muttering about work to do. He can't decide if he needs to get that story from Parker right now or really, really doesn't ever.

Parker was in his office looking tired and hassled, two little girls with her. The smaller wore pink and sullenly carried a Ballerina Barbie under one arm. The older was a total contrast, denim dungarees and check shirt, eleven or so years of knowing everything already and you could see it in her truculent brown eyes.

"This is Yasmin Reed," he remembers Parker said. "We finally convinced her it wouldn't be better if everyone in the world was a ballerina." Ouch. "This..." He remembers the way she met his eyes so very tiredly as she rested her hand on the shoulder of the older girl. "This is Nicki, Yasmin's sister. Ever since little Jimmy Conlon next door drowned at the beach, Nicki has been telling everyone at school that he was eaten by a sea monster."

He remembers the silence that stretched and then, finally, saying back to her, "We killed the monster," and seeing Nicki's eyes go wide. In the face of their dishevelled, sandy, bloody, and still heavily armed state, he suspects that if it wasn't true before... well, it is now.

He vaguely remembers Parker telling Duke to for God's sake take him home, and that he wasn't stellar about leaving her there with so much still to do, but it all gets dim after that, and no amount of racking his brain can figure how he ended up walking out of there.

"One little girl telling tall tales," Duke says, toasting him with his mug of tea. "How about that? It nearly killed you."

Nathan pours out a cup for himself. He doesn't know what it is, and it's definitely not his preferred wake-up brew, but it's wet and he assumes warming. "Didn't kill Jimmy Conlon," he says, the realisation coming slow. Yesterday, he must have been way past the point of putting all the pieces together. "Nor any of those other folks."

"No. No, it didn't."

Nathan groans and covers his face with his hand.

When he reads over the file, later, he'll see it clear as day, how the facts twisted and changed as the story evolved. From a child running into the waves, caught by an unexpected larger swell, dragged to the bottom and lost to the unpredictable currents, to a child pulled from his mother's hand, pulled by something below the surface. Until a monster came into being, lurking out there in the isolation of Carol Point, preying on the unwary. Birthed by no more than a thought.

"Yeah, I know," Duke says wryly. "Just don't think about it, that's my advice. It was real by then, and only a matter of time before it hurt someone... else. I could have killed it just for... You know that was about the scariest few minutes of my life, right?"

Nathan hears it in his voice and looks up to find the other man's face too close, too earnest, and he doesn't have the brains or energy for this right now, either. "I couldn't feel it. Barely knew what was happening. Couldn't make much sense of it, except--" He flicks his tongue across his lip, searching for a trace of that phantom taste.

He and Duke look at each other, and in that weighted moment, Nathan's sure there's a number of ways things could go. But what he chooses is to quietly hold his hand up between them, a silent, warning stop. Not necessarily permanent. Not absolute. But he's not ready to do this. Not ready in any number of ways.

Duke looks down and covers the twisting line of his mouth with his teacup.

"Well, good morning, the intrepid duo!" Parker hails from the harbour side, far too cheerily. "What's next? Sasquatch? Nessie?" She climbs over to the boat while Nathan's struck with the mounting horror he's clad in only a sheet. Her eyebrows shoot up. "You're kidding, right? Nathan Wuornos? Did you sleep here?"

"No!" Nathan yelps, and after a moment realising it's not true, "Not together." Obviously that's well into the realm of protesting too much, because Duke's rolling his eyes, which are transitioning from the mutedness of his disappointment to laughing at him, and he can see Crocker intends to take revenge where he can get it for being turned down.

Duke leans closer over the table and hisses, "You know, that's not technically true."

Audrey Parker is delightedly spluttering, hands covering her mouth.

Nathan can't even react. His whole face shuts down. He loses the corner of his sheet, flashing shoulder and bandage, but his numb fingers just flail in their grope to reclaim it. He's confused. He and Duke definitely didn't... He knows he can't feel, but he's pretty sure he'd have damn well been aware of it if they did that. "You...?"

"I was pretty tired last night. Didn't really have anywhere else to go." Duke takes pity and pats Nathan's knee. His bare knee. Once he looks up, Duke's quick to remove the hand, and there's a bit of strain in his humour as he adds, "Don't worry, princess, I didn't touch you."

"I hope you realise it is your patriotic duty to tell me everything that happened yesterday," Parker asserts. "I'm a federal agent. There are things I can do to you if you won't talk."

"Right now?" Duke asks.

"Where are my clothes?" Nathan growls, standing up, making another grab for the edge of the sheet.

"Technically, they're my clothes."

Parker's expression lights up, again, like she's been offered cookies. It occurs to him that if he runs, not only is it looking like he'll have to do it in a state of undress, but she'll get the tale from Duke, with whatever additions he feels like embroidering it with. Torn, Nathan stands and weighs his options.

Shooting Duke is looking more and more like it'll be worth the paperwork.

END

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