Title: Breathe
Author: roseveare
Rating: PG13
Length: ~2700 words
Summary: Duke tries to teach Nathan how to meditate. Set season 4 after The New Girl.
Notes: Written for Dorinda, Troublesfest 2014.
Disclaimer: Not mine, no profit, yadda, yadda, yadda.

Breathe

"All right now, slowly and regularly, just breathe..." But Duke opens his eyes again as he thinks of something else. "Actually, I don't know if that's a good position for you. It's not like you can tell if you get dead-leg."

From a cross-legged stance, close enough to his own that their knees almost touch, Nathan scowls back at Duke, and asserts, "I'm fine. If we're doing this, let's just get on with it and get it over with."

Which is very much not the right attitude, but then who was really expecting anything resembling that?

They're sitting on the floor of Duke's living space in the Cape Rouge, on a red, blue and gold hand-woven Tibetan meditation mat. A small candle flickers on the table next to their heads. So far, Nathan has turned his nose up at the mat (Duke is seriously never owning up to how much he paid for it), and looked suspiciously at the candle, as though New Age flakiness might be a disease he could catch. "It's just an aid to setting the mood," Duke had said defensively, and Nathan had returned, "You're planning to wine and dine me, now?"

He'd been planning to do this in the open air, as with Jen, but Nathan had flat refused on the grounds that he might be seen by other people.

Nathan only agreed to this because Jen told him how it helped her to focus on finding Audrey in the Barn, and because he's so damn shaken up after Audrey came back as Lexie. The guy prepared himself for death yesterday. Duke is glad he's still breathing; he isn't too sure about Nathan's stance on it. At least he's still a stubborn ass: he pretty much opened with, "I'm not going to hang upside-down or stand on my head."

But those aren't the first things he'd try with Nathan anyway, fun as they might be to witness, if there was any chance he could ever be persuaded on the issue.

"Okay." Duke does a spot of breathing himself. This isn't actually a great time. He has one major source of stress in the things he knows about 'Lexie' that he can't tell Nathan, and a fierce spike of pain in the spot Jennifer drove the pen into evil!possessed!Duke's leg. "Let's try this again. Close your eyes. No peeping." He shuffles forward an illicit fraction, so that his knees touch Nathan's. It doubles up as a way to ensure against cheating. Nathan doesn't object to the touch - and this way he'll be better able to tell if Nathan's body rhythms change.

"If I fall asleep..." Nathan starts.

"If you fall asleep, then this exercise will still have had value." Duke studies Nathan's face, only smoothed out a little by his eyelids being shut. It's more pinched than serene. There are dark smudges under his eyes, new lines around his jaw, and the new scar on his forehead glares out. Since Duke found him again, Nathan has been running on fumes in a manner that would be worrying even without his voiced conviction that he has to die to end the Troubles. Duke has wanted to do something for him, with little idea of what he could do that would help. He shouldn't get his hopes up for this attempt, given Nathan's attitude toward 'fluffy New Age thinking', but he can't help it. "Just view it as an opportunity to rest and forget about all your cares for a few minutes."

Nathan snorts. He doesn't say anything, leaving that to cover his opinion. At least his eyes are still shut.

"Okay, but try," Duke urges, exasperated. He could use a little chilling out time himself, but tutoring Nathan in anything is never going to be a stress-free pastime, so his own meditations will probably have to wait. Maybe he's better off keeping his eyes open and making sure Nathan's okay. He attempts to make his voice soothing and not irritated: also difficult. "Okay, Nathan, we're going to find a bit of stillness and quiet, a place all those worries don't exist. So start breathing slowly, in and out. Just feel those breaths-"

"I wish." The interruption comes with a soft, sarcastic snort.

"-Experience those breaths. Listen to them. Pay attention to your body as it pushes the air in and out. Let's try to… just push those worries out with every out-breath… Let them all go... Okay... okay." He lets that hang for maybe thirty seconds, watching Nathan try as it occurs to him that whole swathes of mindfulness practice aren't going to fucking work. "There are other noises, all around." The sea, the groans of the boat on the waves, the distant birds and, more-distantly, the early afternoon sounds of the marina. "Close those sounds out one by one. We're going to turn that listening inward. Focus on the noises in your body, the ones that tell you you're alive. Blood flowing, heart beating; again the breath, coming and going..."

"This is bullshit." Nathan vibrates in places. His knee jiggles against Duke's.

Duke tries hard not to groan. "Seriously, man, you are wound up like a screw. Just let me try to take that tension out. Let me try, okay? Here, give me your hands. Open your eyes a minute."

Nathan instinctively pulls his hands in against his chest. His eyes study Duke with piercing distrust. "What are you going to do?"

"A touch exercise." Actually, Duke is making this up as he goes along.

"That's particularly pointless." Nathan huffs laughter, which is better natured than it would have been eight months ago.

"That's why your eyes are open now. Nathan." Duke risks injecting a bit more of an edge into his voice, and the response to that can go either of two ways. "You said you'd try."

Nathan sighs and holds out his hands, palms down, fingers spread. They look older and more worn than Duke remembers. "You're not going to tell me to pretend I'm a tree, are you?" Nathan asks, with equal parts wariness and attempted humour.

Duke blinks. "Who tried to do that one with you?"

"Occupational Therapy. From my neurological investigations four years ago. It didn't work then, either."

"So that was about, what? Body awareness?" Duke's genuinely curious - not to mention getting a sympathetic surge of fellow feeling for the last poor bastard who tried to teach Nathan how to meditate.

"Yeah." Nathan stares at his hands as Duke matches their fingertips together. "Back then, it felt like I was floating in space. It was hard to do basic stuff. They tried to get me to-" He snorts again. "To feel my way back into my body, map it out again. By sitting quiet and doing nothing." Contempt lines his voice. But he still watches intently as Duke pushes fingertips against his own, moving their hands an inch or so back toward him.

"And that didn't work?" Duke tries not to put too much sense of fatalism into those words. Nathan is paying a great deal of attention to the way he moves both their hands. "Push," he suggests.

"What worked was getting up and practicing. Doing things over until my limbs remembered what to do."

Which is kind of the blunt-instrument way of doing the same thing, and in Duke's experience of Nathan, the solution he will almost always find. Nathan pushes his fingers back, and Duke puts in enough resistance not to make it easy for him. Their hands stay more or less level between them as the pressure adjusts. They keep at that for a while.

"What are we doing?" Nathan asks. His voice sounds tired, but it's closer to a sort of lulled dullness than aggravation. The mockery has gone. He might not have relaxed much, but he has relaxed. There's not so much resistance to the process in him now.

"Trying something out. Shut your eyes and keep concentrating on my fingers."

Nathan doesn't say anything but his eyebrows are sarcastic and eloquent.

"No, no, no, stop that," Duke scolds. He'd wave a finger, but daren't move his hands, because Nathan still hasn't and he's not going to risk losing that thread of access into Nathan's mood - his calm, which seems to be coming from that touch, forged through pressure he can't feel and subtle movement, which presumably he can feel after some fashion, because otherwise he'd have to look at his feet when he walks. "I want you to focus on feeling your hands. My hands. Our hands."

Nathan nods slowly. He grimaces. "Don't poke me, or anything."

"Not eight years old any more, Nate." Duke reins it in, sighs. "Really, you can trust me. I'm all grown up now."

Nathan swallows, his Adam's apple jumping hard in his skinny throat. "I know. I do trust you." And if this session proves an utter waste of time otherwise, it will still have been worth it for that. Duke feels a new warmth pool in his stomach. Then Nathan adds, "I don't trust your sense of humour."

"My sense of humour isn't having a very good time of things lately," Duke reassures him. "You're probably safe."

Nathan's eyes are already shut. Duke leans in and pushes with his fingers. Nathan pushes back. Their hands shift in a miniature give and take across the line between their folded knees. Nathan looks more serene now than he did ten minutes ago. Duke almost becomes too absorbed in the fact he might actually be getting somewhere to act on it.

"Breathe," he says, stretching out the word, trying to keep his voice mellow. "Use my breaths as a guide." He sucks in air, having to steel himself somewhat to do it regularly and get the rhythm right, after spouting all of this to Nathan. He's not exactly a guru.

"Oh my God," Nathan says, sounding dazed, although some of that is just attitude being framed a different way, because he goes on to add, "You just used your bedroom voice on me."

Duke thinks about it and... "Okay. Maybe I just did that. But I'm going to keep using it on you until you relax, Nathan. You don't speak ninety nine percent of the time. How is it all that's required to get you to turn into Mr Chatty McChattypants is to ask you to be quiet?"

The response he gets for that is silence; impossible to tell if that's compliance or subtle mocking. The fact is that Nathan might be silent but he's never quiet. There's always something seething or simmering under his surface. It's the great contradiction of his Trouble.

"Just shut your eyes, focus on our hands, and try to match my breathing," Duke says. "And now I am going to stop talking, lest I prove so irresistible that you end up making me pancakes for breakfast tomorrow. Focus on our hands. Okay?"

Nathan still doesn't reply, but Duke takes it for compliance this time. He watches Nathan sit and breathe, and realises that he's actually doing it. The success gives him an oddly giddy feeling, like he's conquered uncharted - untouched - territory. He keeps up that pressure between their spread fingers, which is oddly combative, oddly intimate, and he wonders about the power it seems to have to comfort, or perhaps ground, Nathan.

When he thinks about it, floating in space must be a scary state, especially if it's happening behind closed eyelids, without contrary information from the eyes. Trying to focus on nothing, when there really is nothing... Or worse, on the sensation, the lack of sensation inherent in that state of being... It's not really surprising, put that way, that Nathan might not want to embrace meditation practice. Well, his attention span is short for anything that doesn't actively engage him, anyway - ie. most things not police work or desperately unmanly hobbies - because he's Nathan. But maybe there's something else going on here, too, in Nathan's incapacity to be still.

Duke finds himself drifting into relaxation after all. He finds he wants to close his eyes, so he does, with a last check of Nathan, whose face is now both smoothed out and oddly intent. In darkness, the pressure of their fingers together becomes a fine point of focus. It becomes the whole world. Duke breathes, and he can feel the breath echoed across Nathan's skin. He can feel the pulse in Nathan's fingertips, the other man's warmth suffusing into him. It's like they're joined together; Nathan flows into him, and vice versa. Their pulses seem to beat in time, passing between them. Their breathing has naturally fallen into sync; matching each other, always.

He's touched by an undeniable regret that there are so many of these signals Nathan can't appreciate, that he lacks the capacity to process. On the other hand, this quiet, trusting experience of touch, in whatever ways Nathan can experience it - that's not something Nathan gets a whole lot of in his life, either.

Nathan's breathing grows more relaxed, more carelessly audible, unguarded. He's not in danger of falling asleep, because Duke can still feel the pressure of their fingers, still pushing. So can Nathan, he thinks... Force and movement, if not contact. Muscle awareness. Nathan's world.

Duke starts to feel another point of focus, pulsing hot in his groin, and wonders if this is on the verge of becoming some other type of experience. If maybe it isn't meditation after all. It's already more intimate than he'd ever planned. That's not particularly appropriate, considering Jen, and Nathan's relationship with Audrey and the goals he must pursue with Lexie. Duke tries to push the intrusive thoughts away - the heat and the other complicated things it brings with it. He thinks Nathan might be making a better go at meditation right now than he is.

Slowly, the world and its worries empty themselves out. Duke just is, whole and here. And Nathan is with him.

He comes aware by slow stages that the rhythm of Nathan's breathing has changed again. He's not moving or talking, and he's not asleep, as the pressure between their fingertips continues to prove, so Duke lets the calm roll onward, flowing with the experience. He's dimly aware that his arms have begun to go numb, fingers trembling a little, after so long raised like this.

Eventually it's just too odd, and he really wants to find out what Nathan is doing, so he opens his eyes.

Nathan's blue eyes stare directly into his. He'd like to think they're relaxed, but they're still a little bit wild. Nathan swallows and licks his lower lip. After a pause he says, hoarsely, "Duke."

Duke shakes his head, trying to chase the stars from behind his eyes. "How long have you been watching me?"

"A while." Nathan pulls his hands away, slowly, as if he doesn't quite want to. He rubs them together. Duke's senses are all still tuned to the details, and he hears weathered and cracked skin rasping. Nathan shifts in place, makes a false start to get up, then frowns as he discovers his legs don't want to. He settles for uncurling them from the cross-legged pose and stretching them out.

Duke looks at the clock and groans internally. All of that, and it was less than half an hour?

And yet Nathan, as he watches, does look refreshed, relaxed - at least different. Maybe there's more looseness in his expression, and something has been released of that tight-wound tension that's plagued him ever since the - well. Not even since the Barn. He's been tense forever. The last few months of last year were bad, and after that was worse. So even if he's been returned to pre-Audrey disappearing or immanently disappearing levels of tension, only for a little while, that's an achievement.

It felt longer than half an hour to Duke, who still doesn't feel like his head is yet back in the game. Who is only glad that the heat in his crotch mostly subsided.

He sighs as he picks himself up, too, and provides an arm for Nathan to lean on. Propping Nathan against the counter, he goes to get a drink. He slides Nathan a glass of juice across the counter.

"So. Same time tomorrow?" he asks wryly.

"Like that's going to happen." Nathan pulls a face, gulps his juice, then double-takes at whatever he sees in Duke's expression in that unexpectedly vulnerable moment. He shuffles. "I mean... Troubles. Lexie. Police work. It's not like I exactly have a schedule that lends itself to making and keeping appointments, Duke." He stops, and holds Duke's gaze for a moment, until Nathan nods, slowly, then gifts him this much: "I guess we'll just have to play it by ear."

END