TITLE: Body Guard
AUTHOR: roseveare
RATING: R
LENGTH: ~5000 words
SUMMARY: Things will never be simple for Jordan. Five(ish) times she saves Nathan's life.
NOTES: Companion fic and balance to Five Times Jordan McKee Killed Nathan Wuornos. Set after 4.2 Survivors. It's possible this could lead-in to 4.3 or be canon-divergent depending on interpretation.
DISCLAIMER: Not mine, no profit, yadda yadda yadda.
1.
Jordan is a guard. She's guarding. That's all this is.
Two days ago, Nathan Wuornos came back to town, having fucked them all six ways from Sunday in the closing act of last year, bringing with him his grand plan to save everyone, announcing there was hope...
She could laugh at that. The end result is what she wants anyway. Only this way, it's still Audrey that gets to have him.
Yesterday, Nathan almost got himself burned to a crisp, damning all of them, again, with their faint hopes barely reignited. Today, she is guarding him.
It's windy enough in the early morning that the spring blossoms from the trees outside Nathan's big house are blowing down to coat the hood and windshield of her car. Last night she could not sleep, too many things gliding in circles around her brain, and she woke from sick dreams with dust on her tongue. She thought, then, that she might as well be here as anywhere, Nathan's watchdog this year as last.
Nathan's is a fragile thread of a life to stand between Haven and damnation. Jordan sees him now like a ghost, wearing those six months of who-knows-what etched into his weary skin. Troubles are rife, she isn't the only one who wanted him dead, and not everyone believes his plan represents any hope at all. The truth is he needs a bodyguard.
She yawns and stretches, moving her body deliberately. At some point she needs to get herself a coffee, because she can feel her eyelids starting to sag, and she should move the car anyway, before Nathan can wake up and look out of his windows.
She remembers thinking those things, and then the world floats for a little while. Another car slides down the road in front of her, too slowly, and she jolts fully conscious again to watch its passage, her fingers tightening around the gun in her lap. Then it's gone, and things drift again, though she's not asleep. Before she knows it, Nathan's front door is crashing open. He's surging out, barefoot and barely wearing his jeans, pulling a shirt on over his shoulders as he stalks toward her. Jordan considers her options and winds the window down instead of starting the engine. Right in time for his fingers to clamp the upper edge of the glass as his harsh voice demands, "What the hell are you doing?"
"Just protecting this town's best interests," she returns.
He takes that the wrong way. His knuckles whiten at the level of her nose. Beyond them, his blue eyes spark like dying stars. "I'm not going to run."
No. She knows him too well to think that. She actually suspects he's looking forward to playing the role of martyr, absolving his sins in death.
He can believe what he likes. She's been sitting here since 2.20AM and more than one car she's recognised slowed and then drove on by after discovering her on watch. She gives him a smile and a jeer. "No, you won't run."
They're so close she could reach out and touch his mostly-bare chest, and she could touch it, without the usual consequences... other consequences, plenty of those. She's distracted a moment before being slapped back to reality by the realisation that his bullet wounds didn't scar. It must be something to do with his Trouble, but the least compensation she could have hoped for was to leave marks on him the way Crocker's bullets left them on her.
He throws his hands up and turns his back on her, then reverses the motion in swift paranoia. She supposes she did shoot him. "I can't work like this. What, you're planning to trail my every move from now until-?" His angry voice cuts off.
Jordan needs a bathroom and a coffee, both of them calling with ever more urgency, so no. "Just until the next shift comes on." Let him drive himself crazy looking for them.
Which isn't a guarantee, she realises coldly, that he won't have other watchers. Maybe it's just as well that he looks for them... so long as he isn't thinking he trusts their purposes. Not that he trusts her purposes, but for good measure, she adds, "Wonder how long it takes us all to get bored of this and just finish you."
There. She puts her foot down and watches Nathan's aghast face recede in the rear view mirror.
She doesn't know how many times she might have saved his life in this one night. This really isn't fair.
2.
Some instinct makes Jordan grab Ian Arndale's wrist as he brushes too close past them in the station corridor. She's expecting to have to explain herself, and left shocked instead by the syringe in his hand. Nathan wouldn't have felt the jab, wouldn't have felt the needle's load start to take effect.
When he isn't being a member of the Guard, Ian Arndale is a vet. She has no doubt whatever's in the syringe would get the job done... quietly, efficiently and, obviously, painlessly.
She's furious enough to wrench her glove off with her teeth before clamping her hand on his arm and dragging him outside. She spies two of the others waiting for him in the street and glares daggers their way, instructing with her eyes that they follow.
Everyone here knows her after the Guard's involvement picking-up after Troubles over winter, but it still says something about Haven that she just dragged a man screaming from a police station and no-one has done anything.
Jordan finally releases her hold as they reach the grass outside the building. Arndale's friends are running up and she knows them, too - Colin Silas and Ben Riley. "What the hell do you think you're doing?" she shouts, getting hers in before they can begin on theirs.
"It's really something to see you swallow this 'deal' crap," Silas growls. Arndale isn't in a state to say anything. "After everything you've said up till now..."
"That was when we were stuck like this forever because of him!" she retorts, spreading her hands, gloved and ungloved. He flinches away from the latter.
Silas manifests toads wherever he steps when he loses concentration - which, okay, is weird and makes life a long string of difficult explanations, but it's not the end of his freakin' world. He can touch people. He can live. It's even moderately controllable, although half a dozen toads hop away from the path he took across the grass now.
Arndale has it worse, with the disturbing ability to take on characteristics of whichever animals he gets too near to. It sucks to lose your passion and livelihood, and Jordan understands that he's almost as driven as she is.
Ben got the short straw out of all of them. He can disappear altogether if no-one's paying attention to him. If he's absent at Guard meetings, they have it as a standing item on the schedule to sit and focus really hard on him until he reappears. The fact he's quiet now isn't such a good sign.
Jordan takes a deep breath. Arndale's starting to shake it off, and he looks pissed. They're not all three big men, but they're larger than her, trained and dangerous. She feels vulnerably covered up.
But they're hers. Vince gave her more responsibility after she broke rank to return to the Barn last year, after she almost died trying to prevent Nathan's selfish fuck-up. Even if she didn't succeed, at least Vince acknowledged that. These men have been following her for months, listening to her for months. She led them down this path in the first place. Why won't they listen to her now?
"You were sweet on Wuornos," Arndale says raggedly, shoving at the ground trying to rise. "All that talk about finishing him for good. Funny how it stopped the moment you were handed an excuse to spare him."
"You think I'm soft?" Jordan stares at them in utter disbelief. "No-one wants Nathan dead more than I do. No-one. I'd kill him now if there wasn't the faintest chance that this might work - it doesn't even have to be a big one, if there's a chance, I'll take it. If Audrey killing Nathan makes the Troubles go away, it will all be worth it."
She trembles as she vocalises that and hopes they take it for anger. She loses Nathan to Audrey this way, too.
"Besides," she spits. "Slipping him a quiet dose of poison? Seriously? He can't feel, idiot! He wouldn't even know he was dying! And I want him to know. If his 'plan' with Audrey doesn't work… oh, we'll still kill Nathan. You can count on it. But we need to make it better than that."
Arndale grimaces and she thinks she's got him. Maybe even Silas, too. Ben... she looks around and thinks they might have lost Ben. Damn it.
"All right," Arndale says, and Silas is nodding. "For now. But this waiting game is going to wear thin, fast."
"Oh yes it is," Jordan agrees. She resists the urge to sigh with relief and splays her naked hand in front of his face. "Just remember this. When the time comes, Nathan's mine. Not yours, not his -" She jabs a finger a Silas, who jumps back. "Not any of the others. You spread the word. You tell them anyone but Audrey looking to push to the front of that queue is in for a world of pain."
After recent demonstration they're sullen and silent, because that, they know she can deliver.
3.
A body guard is exactly what she is - she's guarding a body, a living corpse, and she watches Nathan stalk down the road like a ghoul, dark shadows beneath his eyes, stubble greying his face, dark clothes hanging off his bones. In time the threads of their fates will spin out and, ceasing his stubborn continuation of movement, the dead man will die.
And serve him right, a part of Jordan savagely thinks. He should have chosen her. This is his reward for loving Audrey Parker.
But Jordan doesn't just want him dead, she wants him dead by her hand, and so in this, as with much else, she's doomed to be left unsatisfied.
Nathan is the only person in the world who isn't revolted by her touch. He's just revolted by her, apparently. Fair enough, she was revolted by herself after the incident with the kid, but Nathan doesn't forget. She'd think he might have forgiven, a little, since he screwed over every Troubled person up to and including Ginger Danvers so magnificently at the Barn that day. At least more people benefited in her selfish equation.
Nathan, more than anyone else, makes her feel like poison to everyone and everything. She spends her life thinking about stopping someone else's with her own hands, and she can feel all of it building inside her to some sort of explosion.
She leans, with her knees drawn up and her gun rested across them, outside Nathan's door as the day draws to a close. Nathan looked out of the window a few times earlier; now he's ignoring her. There is no point in secrecy any more. She is a better deterrent in the open, gloves-off. Or maybe she's staking a claim. Ian Arndale nearly killed Nathan today. She hopes this underlines the message clearly to the rest of them.
The sunset stains the sky orange. She thinks about getting pizza delivered. She wonders whether forcing Nathan to open the door at gunpoint so she can use his bathroom is beneath her dignity. She's still pondering when Dwight turns up like a miracle bearing coffee and a take-out burger.
"There's a certain amount of irony in this," he says while she's wolfing down the burger in about three bites, and to her dismay, casually rings Nathan's bell and then leans on the porch watching her, his arms crossed and his brows gently raised.
All she can do is make an incoherent protest. By the time she manages to swallow, Nathan is opening the door. "Screw you, Dwight," Jordan hisses with belligerence, rather than worshipping at his feet as she'd felt ready to a moment ago.
It's heartening that the first thing she sees is the pistol in Nathan's hand. He relaxes it at the sight of Dwight, opens the door wider and steps back to let them in. "Everything quiet?" Dwight asks, and Nathan grunts affirmation. Jordan is briefly self-conscious about being the only member of this company who communicates in sentences. She sighs and hesitates on the doorstep, glancing around the street, before following the two men inside. She directs a scowls into the centre of Dwight's large back.
Nathan is watching baseball with the sound turned right down. She wonders if that's because he's listening for danger, and, well, good. He should be alert. People want to kill him.
Dwight might have a point about the irony.
His house is big and she hasn't been inside before, but it would be more intimidating if it weren't mostly empty, or was anything approaching tidy. She caustically asks, "Bathroom?" and then follows his finger where it points. She takes the opportunity to poke her head in a few rooms. The mess and half-finished look are universal.
She comes back to Nathan and Dwight slouched at opposite ends of the TV room, watching the silent baseball. They've broken into a six-pack and a few cans sit beside each of them. Jordan rolls her eyes and goes to the window. Old-man sorts of ornaments decorate the sill… obvious holiday souvenirs, a novelty ashtray, a porcelain dog. Nothing much in this house feels like it belongs to Nathan. Jordan has a dim memory of hearing him say he moved into his dad's place, at some point. Maybe he lost his own when he was out of town for six months, maybe it was earlier than that and this state of living has been endemic for him for much longer.
She supposes it's irrelevant to think that isn't healthy when he's already a walking corpse.
On the other side of the glass, beyond the slope of the unkempt garden, beneath the trees in the gathering dark, silhouetted against the last strips of orange low in the sky, she sees a head and the long muzzle of a gun lined up next to it. In surprise her hand grips a heavy fall of drapes, casting more light into the darkness outside. She stares into familiar eyes, and stares, and whatever he can see of her frozen face in return, the man behind the rifle shifts and lowers it, then backs off, disappearing into the dark line of shrubbery at the garden end.
Jordan can hear her heart beating wild in her chest. She reaches out both sides and shuts the drapes. "You fucking idiot, Nathan," she says. Then she storms around the house ferociously closing the rest, checking the windows, locking the doors. If she hadn't come inside… "It's like you want to die," she yells through to him, while she's balanced on the kitchen counter, trying to reach the lock on the window above the sink.
The two men are confused: they grunt, they roll eyes - probably, behind her back, they roll eyes - and they consider this no more than paranoia. Of course they do. She can't tell them why it isn't.
She has to get the Guard under control. Dwight isn't one of them any more; worse, these days he carries a badge. She won't betray the people she's worked and fought beside.
They're hers, but they haven't seen enough to believe the craziness of Nathan's offered hope, the way she has. They weren't at the Barn that day. They didn't lie bleeding and watch through pained haze as that thing curled in on its own reality and vanished. If that can happen, if that's the heart of this, she's not going to rule out anything regarding what the rules are and aren't.
She didn't sleep last night and she wasn't planning on sleeping this one. But curled on Nathan's sofa, between Nathan and Dwight on the upright chairs, a gun next to her and Nathan in her line of sight...
...Well. There must be something comforting about that, though in which way she wouldn't like to guess. Her eyes drift closed, and the next thing she knows, Nathan wakes her up stumbling noisily down the stairs with the dawn.
4.
Nathan is holding her hand. Somehow, that's the biggest insult of the whole situation.
He's holding her hand and swearing while she bleeds. It must also be his hand pressed over the wound. She blinks up at his stretched face and tries to piece the world back together from pain and confusion. The knife slid in under her ribs. It ended up there because she was in the way.
That recollection doesn't help. In what universe does she throw herself between Nathan Wuornos and a knife?
Her back is wet and cold, a hard surface underneath her. Sidewalk-hard, and it's been raining. Still is, she realises. She can feel cold droplets on her face. Nathan's head bowed over her provides some shelter. She's on the street outside the police station and just took a knife for Nathan.
Didn't Nathan leave town?
"I think she hit her head when she fell," Nathan's mouth shapes. It seems like she sees his lips move the moment before the words, like her brain isn't processing sight and sound at the same pace. "The cut's shallow, but we should fix the bleeding."
She can't see who he's talking to.
She grinds his hand between her fingers because she can. Nathan... He's touching her like he cares. His face is creased in worry. The memory that Audrey is gone comes back to her and gives her a funny leap of euphoria, even though she hates Nathan, wanted to see him die.
She almost smiles at him before the rest of the memories slam into her, making her cry out as they hit, then again as movement twists the knot of pain beneath her ribs. First bullets, now a knife.
Audrey's gone but they mean to bring her back. Nathan is here, but only as a dead man walking. It won't even fall to Jordan to kill him, to commit that final act of intimacy.
"Easy," Nathan says, still looking like he gives a damn, and that makes her want to kill him all the more. Freeze the look on his face and keep him that way forever.
"Jordan, help is coming." Dwight's voice rides in soothingly, spoiling the illusion that the world is composed only of the two of them. The person Nathan is talking to is Dwight. She raises her head to look for him and the world tries to slide sideways. She feels sick.
"Don't move," Nathan says, redundantly.
Dwight tells Nathan, "I called the ambulance, but-"
"I don't need a fucking ambulance." The knife wound is a pinprick. Jordan didn't lose consciousness. She was just... confused. "Let me up."
It's not for her. There it is, the last cue of place and time and circumstance to click. There is another body on the ground beside her, and the ambulance isn't going to do him any good, either.
She was already reaching for his naked throat when the knife went in, when her grip tightened and he convulsed so hard in agony that he snapped his own neck. She absolutely didn't intend to kill Ben Riley. He was one of her own, and she agreed with him all the way. Nathan stuck them with the Troubles forever, Nathan deserves to die.
Except she also dared believe in hope.
Hope has made her a murderer.
She moans and twists onto her side, shoving Nathan's hand clear to curl her own arm across the shallow stab wound, wrenching her fingers from Nathan's grip. This is his fault, and she let herself indulge in touching him. She rolls her forehead into the pavement, not caring that her hair is getting grimed and damp. She stays like that, with her back to the corpse, with her back to the men, while Nathan and Dwight fuss and argue and whisper over her, not knowing what to do. She thinks they're probably discounting this as some kind of female hysteria, because they've both fucking killed people before, only those weren't their friends, only they weren't the ones who riled them up and shot them like an arrow at the target she's just killed and almost died to protect.
It probably doesn't matter if she cries. They're probably expecting tears anyway. But her eyes are still dry when she decides she can't take any more of this shit and forces herself to curl upwards onto her knees.
"Don't try to-" Nathan starts.
"Fuck off!"
The swipe of her bare hand won't hurt him but it just came perilously close to Dwight, and the near-miss makes them both cautious.
She twists her eyes away again from the body. If Nathan's answers don't work now, she doesn't know what she'll do.
"Jordan, you need to wait for..."
She's on her feet and Dwight's words infuriate her to hiss, "I've dealt with paper cuts before. I didn't hit my head."
"I think maybe you did."
She's pretty sure she passed out before she fell. Her head still reels and she clings to Dwight's quickly offered, clothed arm, despite herself. She thinks maybe it is ambitious to consider going anywhere. At the very least, she can't drive yet.
He says, "At least come inside and sit down, and let Lucassi take a look at you."
She glares at Nathan, then back to Dwight, and instructs fiercely, "Promise me you'll watch him."
Nathan, in receipt of this treatment, sullenly retreats into stubbornness and pouts at both of them. "I don't need..."
"She's right." Dwight cuts him off. "That was an assassination attempt. Maybe I have been taking this too lightly."
She's handed off to a uniformed officer while Dwight fulfils his promise to stick to Nathan. Jordan can't help but think that validation ought to feel more satisfying, but by now she should be used to this being the way things always go.
5.
She's glazed-staring on pain meds and probably not in her right mind. Dwight will be pissed but it's just as uncomfortable in her car as at home, and she's happier here. She doesn't think she can rest anyway. The police officer already stationed outside Nathan's house knows her, raised his radio as he watched her drive up. Jordan figures she has a limited amount of time before Dwight arrives. Probably it was a waste of time coming at all.
She has less than that. It's less than a minute before a light in the house switches on. There's an echoing slam as Nathan shoves the front door back hard on its hinges. Then he's stalking towards her, steps heavy, hands fisted. Jordan leans back tiredly and pushes the button to open all the locks, releasing a slow sigh. When he yanks on the door handle, it doesn't damage her vehicle or the precious sacrificial goat.
"This needs to stop." He's ducking down, reaching inside the car. An unwilling thrill travels through her as she realises he's going to touch her, mingled as ever with her automatic double-take of panic that relaxes as she realises he can.
She should have stuck with panic. Being manhandled out of the car hurts, sparking a starburst of pain below her ribs despite the meds. She slaps him and he ignores it, grabbing her shoulders and shaking her. "You didn't notice I have a police escort now?"
Maybe it wasn't Dwight the patrol car called. Haven PD has split loyalties, after all. "Yeah? Maybe the Guard has a different set of interests to protect." There's no guarantee HPD's split loyalties don't also include a few disgruntled Troubled. The Guard don't know about them all.
Nathan's face sort of freezes and then softens. It can't be from what was in her words. She doesn't know what she let slip in her expression. "Jordan, you're hurt. You don't have to be here anymore. Dwight got your point."
She's the only one of them she really trusts. All things considered, that's hilarious. She doesn't say that. She watches him silently as he releases her shoulders, guilt twisting his mouth into a frown.
"You... maybe you saved my life today. I never thanked you for-"
"Don't bother, Nathan." She coats the words in her derision. "If anyone in the Guard gets to kill you, I'm just planning to make sure it's me."
His mouth thins to its most inexpressive line. "At least come inside and plot my demise from the couch."
She stares at him. It was one thing with Dwight there as a buffer between them. Now… it's almost like he's daring her, him and her under the same roof… like he wants her to kill him. Surely he's not so swayed by the fact she (openly) saved his life today that he thinks he's now safe…? Something about the way he returns her stare goes straight to her groin. She licks her lips, straightens, tosses her hair, and reaches back into the car for her gun. "Fine."
She wonders what the police surveillance think as she walks inside his home. Wonders if they'll call Dwight now. This probably isn't a good idea, but if it isn't, it's Dwight's fault for putting it into both their heads last night. The rest she'll blame on the pain meds.
Nathan's house is still and quiet like a tomb. The decor and possessions are fossilized, artefacts not even of his life, but his father's. Nothing has moved since last night, except the beer cans are cleared away and the TV isn't on. This place is dead and stale, a fitting home for a walking dead man.
"You can sleep on the couch," he repeats, giving her a wide berth, eyes watchful, steps careful. "I'm going back to bed."
His clothes aren't quite the dishabille of that first morning, but he's wearing a stained T-shirt and she doubts there's anything under those jeans. His feet are stuffed bare into unlaced boots. His expression is strange.
"Nathan," Jordan says, and cuts off. She drops her gaze from his eyes and finds herself staring again at the lines of his body under the thin, thrown-on clothes.
Considering fate provided such a limited choice for her in prospective partners, in some ways it wasn't entirely unkind. He is a beautiful, chiselled man, and it has to, has to be the meds that she is even thinking this. She must be high, to be here in his house, looking at him and thinking these thoughts, after everything that has happened between them.
She has enough wits about her to look and ascertain that the drapes are shut, and retains enough awareness that they're being watched to hope their silhouettes don't give too much of a show.
Then her hand is on the front of his jeans and she's climbing him, hooking one thigh over his hip as his hand clamps her ass, and ow, stretching up hurts her ribs, but the knife wound is a dismissible blur next to the promise of everything else. It has been so fucking long.
Her fingers rip open his jeans. She curls her other hand around the back of his neck, dragging his head down to crush their lips together. He's rough returning the kiss, tongue tasting thoroughly where his lips can't feel. While she's grinding her fingers into his neck, he disengages enough to press his face into the curve of hers, inhaling her.
She feels him press hot against her and slides her eyes down between them; sees him already red and hard in the triangle of his gaping jeans. She kisses him again and bucks into that hot contact, but it's skin against skin she craves. They'll have to disengage before they can get nearer.
Sometimes, tight leather pants are just inconvenient.
"We can't," Nathan gasps, because apparently that gave him too much time to think.
"Fuck," says Jordan, the only reply she can offer. She should be thinking, too. Instead she repeats the word, changing it from an expletive to an instruction as she finally sheds her boots and pants and shoves him, a double-handed push against his chest that lands him on the couch.
She's only bare from the waist down and his jeans are open, but she scrapes his t-shirt up to his armpits and drops to straddle him, and it's enough. He's sweating, though he can't feel any of this. She needs him in her. "Nathan, I swear I will fucking kill you now if you even think about doing anything but nailing me on this couch."
They grapple and glower. His hands are on her thigh, her ass, up under her shirt, and then he's there, hot and living in the core of her, where only unfeeling toys have gone for the longest time. She doesn't owe him her delicacy, so she bluntly asks as she clamps down on his cock if he's getting any more out of this than her dildo.
His returning growl assures her that he is.
She is so ready for this. She delayed last year, coy and nervous when they were growing to like each other, when it was sweet between them as they tip-toed through lies. Now that the lies are gone and there is only hate, she discovers she can fuck him without reservation.
She yelps as Nathan rolls them off the couch and onto the floor, crushing her beneath his weight, re-entering her roughly. She doesn't blame him for the roughness. Even if she thought he had any idea how rough he is being, he has no reason to think overmuch about being gentle. She might kill him tonight. She might kill him in the morning. Right now she rakes with her nails and bites at his jaw, digs holes in his skin and hopes Audrey gets to see how she's marked him before the end.
He is careful in one respect - never putting undue pressure on her side where he knows she took a knife meant for him.
As he comes inside her, she thinks nothing more romantic than that she'd better make damn sure she gets a morning-after pill from the drugstore tomorrow.
It's over. They should be falling apart hissing and spitting, cursing each other and turning to lick their wounds. It was more like a fight than sex. She feels bruised and she'll probably be walking funny; he has a crazy pattern of scratches gouged in his chest and teeth-marks on his face he won't be able to hide. Instead, he rolls onto his back and carries her with him, hands on her shoulder and butt, and as they lie there, they breathe and they stroke one another, petting like this was an act of love.
...The fuck?
This is no fairy tale and they are both already too damaged for happy endings.
Jordan is lulled and rocked by the rise and fall of Nathan's chest, proof he lives yet, when the fact he shortly might not spikes anxiety through her. She crawls up his body to draw her palms down his face, clasps his jaw in their frame and stares into his blue eyes, desperately trying to quantify both their feelings in the freefall of that extended contact.
Was this one last dance before death?
Or has she just fucked him, herself, and the rest of Haven all in one?
END