Natalie found Nick at the waterfront cleaning up the details of a rather messy collar. The suspects, an IAD chief and an organized crime boss, had tried to run him down and hadn't counted on an indestructible man. An ambush as he returned from looting the coroner's lab, a couple of bullets to the torso and a couple hours locked in the trunk of his own car had speedily detoxed Nick, and he was back to his former self and deeply mortified for his behavior of the past 24 hours. It was clear to Natalie that he remembered nothing of the final stages of his drug-induced mania. She stood by as Schanke finished conferring with Nick.

"Can you spare a minute," she asked, taking his arm to draw him away. He'd shown her a flash of fang as she approached, to reassure her that he was his ancient self again.

"Nat, I don't know what to say."

"It was my mistake too. Don't worry about that now. We have to talk about Maura."

He was puzzled. "Maura? I dropped her off home this afternoon. Things got a little crazy after I went to the precinct, you were right, I had no idea how that stuff was poisoning me."

"You really don't remember, do you?" She had assumed as much but still it seemed incredible that he could have done so much damage and remain completely unaware of it.

The puzzled look continued.

"Remember what? I dropped her off, I went to the precinct, and went home again and took more of the drug. Then I hit the lab like a psycho to get even more, I guess, and after that's when I ran into these two, I came to in my trunk not long ago," he indicated the two men in handcuffs.

"Nick, we need to talk." Natalie gripped his arm for emphasis, and he looked down at her hand.

"We are talking."

"Somewhere else." She made him get in the Caddy with her after taking his leave of Schanke, so nobody else would hear. Now she put a hand on his shoulder, looked him straight in the face and tried to ignore her part in what she was about to tell him. "Nick, I don't know exactly how to say this so I'm just gonna tell you straight out. You did go back to the loft, but Maura went back too, after coming to tell me how crazy you were getting. You had a fight, a bad one."

"Oh shit, I can't remember..."

"You hurt her, Nick."

He looked disgusted with himself, stared out the windshield. "So what else is new It seems to be my perpetual forté." He slammed his hands on the steering wheel. Natalie reached out and forced him to turn to her.

"No, Nick you don't get it. Look at me!" He did, surprised by her outburst. "You had a fight. You hurt Maura, badly."

"Oh shit, what did I say to her," but Natalie cut him off, her voice growing more intense.

"No, Nick. You hit her. You cut her lip, you gave her a black eye. You probably broke one of her ribs."

Nick looked at her as if she were telling him the world were flat. "Nat, I've learned my lesson, you don't have to," he said it as if she were painting a what-if scenario to scare him straight. Her hand tightened against the side of his head, fingers clenched in his hair without realizing.

"Nick, you beat her up. You raped her. She told Janette you argued, she broke the last bottle you had of the drug, so you beat her up and raped her and left her there to go find more."

The car filled with cold silence. Looking at Nick's face, Natalie could almost believe he'd vacated his body. Finally he said one word.

"No."

Natalie stared steadily into his eyes, saying nothing.

"Nat, why are you lying like this, telling me this sick shit?"

"I'm not lying. I came here from Raven, she managed to get to Janette after you left. I did what I could for her, cleaned her up and bandaged what was bleeding. I taped her ribs; I gave her a shot for the pain. My god Nick, she's a mess, she's covered with bruises and contusions," she realized she was reciting Maura's injuries as if someone else had inflicted them, but he needed to know exactly what happened.

"Stop!" Nick's shout was deafening in the confines of the car. He was crowded back against the driver's side door, trying to escape what she was telling him. He scrambled out of the car and ran to lean against a tree, back to the streetlights. If he were mortal he'd have been throwing up. "I didn't do that," he said to nobody.

"Yes you did, Nicholas." LaCroix stood nearby, not quite hidden by the shadows. "The good doctor hasn't exaggerated. I saw the poor woman myself."

Nick's eyes narrowed. "And why would you do that? To gloat?"

LaCroix's gaze remained level. "She believed that too, of course. But no, I wanted to see for myself how far you'd fallen by your own hand. Even your true love acknowledged that at last there was a transgression you could not blame on what I'd made you. This was entirely fed by your own ambitions."

Nick looked sick. "My ambitions?"

"Your delusions, then. The delusion that becoming mortal is worth any price. The trouble is, dear Nicholas, you can't seem to keep from borrowing to pay it. This time you gave up every shred of self control, every one of your 'good intentions', driven by what your Maura described as the inexplicable belief that you could be a 'good' mortal, when in fact the only kind you'd ever been was a barbarian."

"She told you that?"

"And more. I confess I realize now I have misjudged her all this time. She told me if I could persuade you from this latest self-destructive folly, and convince you to abandon your obsessive attempts to escape your nature, that she would give you up for good."

In spite of his distress, Nick laughed derisively. "Always looking for a bargain, eh LaCroix?" he spat.

"Quite the contrary. The lady offered; I merely accepted."

"And you believed her."

"She offered her blood as proof." Nick's eyes glowed red then, but before he could attack LaCroix stepped forward and assured, "I declined her offer. Perhaps there is more honor among nemeses than loved ones. In any case if you'd seen her at that moment you would have seen as I did that she is far more willing to sacrifice her heart than her life, or yours for that matter. As long as you are well and whole and clear of mind at last, she would leave you to my influence whatever that may be. You have to agree that no woman you have ever claimed to love has displayed such a compassionate sense of self preservation. What a new experience it must be for you, to find a mate, a mortal mate, whom you have not needed to hypnotize or coerce. Even a cynic like myself has to wonder why you're so determined to reject that at the encouragement of another who would never truly accept you as you are."

Nick appeared dizzy, shook his head to clear it. "Is she still at Raven?" he wanted to know.

"I don't expect she'll be inclined to move about very soon. But then your brutality as a vampire never quite matched your mortal excesses, did it?" Nick was gone before the echo of his words died. Good, his master thought. Let him see the fruits of his folly. As depraved as LaCroix had been in his time, he had never purported to be anything else. It was time for Nicholas to recognize his own hypocrisy.

"How dare you show your face here," Janette hissed in fury. "Have you have turned your back on your feeble morality so completely that have you no shame left?"

"I came to see," but she wouldn't let him continue.

"I know why you came. To make excuses, to beg forgiveness. To swear no such thing will happen again. Until next time."

Nick's eyes flashed with anger. "Next time?"

"Until the next time your Dr. Lambert waves another pretty promise in front of you. Why will you never grow up, Nicolas? You are like a child distracted by its fondest fantasy... all promises are forgotten, all loyalties ignored. This fetish for mortality, it erases all reason, and for what? Do you not see the irony, Nicolas? That in order to overcome the darkness in your past, you are willing to extinguish every light in your present?"

He wasn't in the mood for lectures, and strode past her toward the office door. "Where is she, Janette? In your private chamber?"

She didn't try to stop him. Like LaCroix, she wanted him to see what he'd done, but for quite a different reason.

At first Nick saw nothing amiss in the figure asleep on Janette's fainting couch, and for a moment of wild relief he believed that they had misled him in order to teach him a lesson. Then he came close enough to see Maura's ravaged face. Her right eye was badly swollen, awash in purple and blue. The mouth he never had enough kisses from was puffed up on one side, a small white bandage patching a bloody cut. Bruises everywhere, reddish handprints on her exposed forearms, scrapes and scratches from what he couldn't imagine. She was deeply asleep, or unconscious, submerged under whatever that Natalie had given her to ease the pain he'd inflicted.

"Oh my best beloved," he whispered, "what is this madness?" He sank into the red velvet chair near the couch, helpless to do anything but stare at Maura and be horrified by this, in his mind far beyond the pale of any offenses he'd committed in his 800 years. What was it she'd told him that time when he'd experimented with near death, that his ratio of seven bad centuries to one good one hadn't built much equity. Whatever there was had been erased today and LaCroix was quite right, he had nobody at all to blame but himself. He bent forward, dropping his head in his hands, and cried.

The voice was familiar, but the sounds it made were not. In her half-sleep Maura heard weeping, quiet and desolate. Heartbroken. But he didn't have a heart, or so he kept telling her.

"Nick?" she rasped. Her throat was dry, everything was so blurry.

He expected her to be frightened of him, and wanted to be cautious, but he was on his knees beside her in less than a second.

His face was tormented, streaked with wetness ranging from pink to deep red. "Better?" Maura tried to whisper, but it was so hard. She wanted to know if he was back to normal. He dropped his fangs as he had done for Natalie, opened his mouth slightly. "LaCroix?" She couldn't imagine he'd been convinced so quickly but then she barely knew where she was, let alone how long she'd been there. Nick shook his head no. Her eyes fluttered shut in relief. "Good." She'd have stood by her promise, but was glad not to have to. Why his face didn't trigger terrors, she didn't understand. Maybe it was because he looked like Nick again, not some thuggish junkie. His voice was quiet, tired, hoarse with tears. But it was Nick's voice. "Sweet," he said, stopping his hand before he could touch her. It was nothing at all like the ugly grunting chant she'd heard not long ago. He was crying again. She tried to reach out to him but gasped at the pain that shot up her side at the movement. Nick dropped his eyes, it was too much for him to see. She took another breath and managed to touch his chin, lifting it so he'd look at her. He said nothing; what could he say? He knew what he'd done, he saw how she was. Then he took her hand, so carefully, cradling it like a wounded bird and found a small, white unblemished spot on her wrist where he could press a soft kiss, then his wet cheek, slumping from his knees to sit on the floor, sobbing into her open hand. He wasn't looking for forgiveness, or even comfort, she could tell even now through her drowsy fog. He was incapable of anything but filling her hand with bloodstained tears. Finally he laid his head on the cushion next to her, and she rested her hand in his hair as she faded again into sleep.

When Janette looked in on them moments later she observed bitterly, "So true love has forgiven cruel delusion yet again." LaCroix, standing at her shoulder, corrected her.

"This has nothing to do with forgiveness. We of all others can recognize an unbreakable bond." He didn't explain further. He didn't need to.

"Natalie, we're going to stop this, now." Having pulled himself together Nick had left Maura asleep in Janette's chamber and gone to the coroner's lab to share his realization and decision with her.

"I couldn't agree with you more. I should never have tested this drug so loosely, with no control. I should never have let you take it with you. It needs a lot more refining, and now that I know what the effects of it were I can go from there. There might be enough residue in your blood to test, if not I can just draw some from you and inject the drug in the lab to check its progress under the microscope." She went rifling through her notebook to find the formula, to find out where it went wrong.

"Natalie, you're not understanding me. We're going to stop, all of it. All of this," he gestured widely, taking in the lab bench, the notebooks, the testing equipment that had become devoted to their projects to find a cure. "I can't believe it's taken this long, it's taken this extreme, for me to finally get it."

Natalie got Nick's drift, and didn't like it. "'Get' what? That we have to be more careful? That you have to remember to consider there's someone else to watch out for? We can do that. Don't worry about that, Nick, after this I'll be the one doing the reminding."

He was shaking his head. Not merely resolute, he felt less like he'd made up his mind than if he'd finally discovered it. "No. There's no 'after this'. I am who I am, and I've done what I've done. There's nothing in the world I can do to make up for any of it, I can only keep from doing it again. That means all of it, 800 years' worth."

"Nick come on, you can't let this change your mind."

"Change my mind? From what? LaCroix was right, I've decided that becoming mortal is worth any price, but I keep borrowing to pay for it! And lately it's always from the same person, the one who'd take me any way I am. It's sick, it's selfish, and I won't do it anymore."

Natalie laughed. "LaCroix? He'd say anything to keep you from finding a way out of this. He'd keep you locked in this cage forever."

Nick's voice developed an edge. "Well it seems Maura felt freer to share some of her deeper insights with LaCroix, things she hadn't been able to tell me. Or more to the point, I never seemed to be listening. If it's a cage as you say, I'm through walking over her and everyone else to get out the door. I appreciate everything you've tried to do for me, Nat, everything we've tried together, and I'm not blaming you for anything that went wrong. But the fact is that the addiction I just came out of came from another stronger one, and I've got to come out of that one, too."

Natalie stared in silence for a moment, then turned away to clean up her already-clean lab bench. "So I guess that means I won't be seeing much of you anymore."

"Nat." He went to her and turned her to face him. "If that's all we've had in common then I've been wrong about a lot of things."

"That's not what I mean, it's just that, well, you've come so close to what you've been wanting for so long." He was shaking his head, smiling gently.

"No, Nat. I have what I've wanted for so long. A job and 'life' that lets me try to undo some of the same kinds of damage I used to do. Friends who don't have to be hypnotized. A home, finally a real home, with someone I love more than I ever imagined I could, who accepts me as someone worthwhile and worth loving, no matter what I drink for dinner. Is that such a terrible thing, that I'm learning I might just have exactly what I want, what I need, and that all the rest isn't worth the pain it causes anyone else?"

"And what about the pain this decision might cause someone else who cares about you?"

"I'm sorry if that's true. I wouldn't hurt you for the world, Nat. You're my best friend, you've been with me against every kind of hell. But I can't keep hurting Maura, or Janette, or myself for that matter, to spare your feelings and professional interest. What I did today finally woke me up, and it makes me sick that this is what it took. Maura's right, Janette is right, even LaCroix is right. I have to play the hand I was dealt, whether or not it was the right choice so long ago. Now's my chance to make right choices. And just think," he smiled and kissed her forehead, "I have all eternity to put the bad guys away."

Natalie stepped back and away. "I'm sorry Nick, I'm so sorry I failed you, I'm sorry we failed at what I kept telling you was possible."

"Oh, Nat, we didn't 'fail', we just succeeded in a way we didn't expect. Can you accept that?"

"I suppose I'll have to." After a moment that hung heavy between them, she blurted, "Nick I never meant to hurt Maura, I never did any of this to try to drive a wedge between you. She must have thought of that sometimes, she told me today that I couldn't face the fact that you were together, that the only way I could find to hold you was to convince you I had something you needed that she couldn't give you. And that I made up for not being able to 'cure' my patients by trying to 'cure' you."

"Maura lets her fear speak for her sometimes. A lot. My guess is she'll be talking to you soon enough to try to take it all back."

Natalie looked helpless. "I'm not all that sure she's wrong… I don't know, Nick. I wish I did."

"We've all fallen into some questions we didn't want to ask, I guess. Don't let it bother you too much, Nat. I think we can all come out even here, if we manage not to screw up too much." He looked almost apologetic as he hugged her tight.

"I have to get back to Raven. I can't pretend to know how to go on from here, but I think at least I have a starting point. I'll talk to you soon." He kissed her cheek again and left her alone in the lab. He'd asked her if their search for a 'cure' was all they'd had between them... and now she was a little afraid of the answer.

By the time Nick returned to Raven the night crowd was in full swing. He dodged some female vampires, who'd always been on the hunt for him, on the way to the office. Feeling a bit of a surge as he stole in the door to the private room he remembered it was new moon tonight.

Maura was dressed and moving about carefully when he entered the room.

"Ow, shit," she mumbled as she reached to pick up the cloak that lay where Janette had flung it. Nick hesitated.

"What are you afraid of? We've established I can't take you no matter how pissed off I am." His wounded expression shut up her smartass attitude. "Don't say it… not funny. You're right about that, Just Nick. None of this is the least fucking bit funny."

"What can I do that will mean anything at all?" Nick asked her simply as she lowered herself like an old lady into the armchair nearby.

"Talk to me Nick. Tell me what's different now than before, tell me how all this unspeakably ugly shit has changed you. Because if it hasn't, I swear I never want to see you again." There was no anger in her voice, just clear honesty. "I don't think either one of us can keep up like this if something in your agenda doesn't change. Think really hard before you answer, because if it's the wrong one I'm gonna tell you to walk away, and you are gonna do it because you'll know I mean every word. And my last memory of you will be getting the shit beat out of me so you could walk in the sun."

Nick sat on the full sized velvet sofa near the fireplace, leaning toward Maura. "I've just come from Natalie's lab. I told her it's finished, over, that I'm through reaching for something I gave up 800 years ago. Some decisions can't be reversed, and I have to deal with mine the best I can. What's changed in me is knowing that nothing I could gain, or hope to gain, could ever be worth what happened today. Even if I suddenly found out that the end result was permanent, and I'd never need that drug again, knowing what happened on the way would make every day a reminder of how you'd paid for it. You, not me. What's changed in me is that I finally woke up and saw that light doesn't only come from the sun, and that when you spend all your time looking backward you just keep running over people." He was beginning to feel like he was veering dangerously close to babbling, and stopped. And watched, and waited. Maura had shut her eyes, dropped her head back against the velvet chair, not answering. After a maddeningly too-many few moments, Nick had to ask. "So how did I do? Did I finally get it, or should I leave now?" He honestly didn't know. When Maura's eyes opened, the black one only partly, they were full of tears.

"Give the man his prize, he has finally rung the fucking bell. And after all this time and all those detours I know you're telling the truth because the only one you've been really good at lying to lately is yourself. And anyway, you can't fake enlightenment." She struggled out of the chair to join Nick on the sofa, leaning against the far end and stretching her legs out so her feet were inches from his leg. He closed one hand over her crossed feet.

"Ever get that feeling of déjà vu?" Maura asked. There was a touch of sadness in her voice.

"Yeah. It's new moon, we're in Janette's chamber, and I'm about to ask you to come home with me again. I wonder what you'll say this time?"

"It's déjà vu. You know already. Besides," she flexed her toes, enjoying the feeling of his grip, "I wanna know what happens next. Sense of adventure, and all."

Nick moved to kneel by her end of the sofa. "It's déjà vu. You know already. But I hope you don't mind if I change a few things this time around."

"I sure as shit hope so. What did you have in mind?"

"Oh I thought maybe this time… no drama."

Maura laughed softly to herself. "Right. I'm still mortal and you're still a vampire..."

"But haven't we gotten at least a little better at it? Not to mention I have the 'Toronto superheroes' to keep my sorry ass in line."

"Oh, brother. A highly refined team of shrewd and clueless mortals, wise and psycho vampires, and me, for whom the jury is still WAY out. But no drama."

He offered his most persuasive smile. "A wise woman once told me, 'everything will find its own way'. Deal?"

"Shit, stumbling and fighting and crashing and kicking and screaming and exploring new and creative ways of fucking up, yeah I'd say we've been finding our own fucking way all right."

"If you're through sweet talking me…"

She kissed him then, not caring about her swollen lip or screaming side, and their foreheads stayed pressed together as they fell into each other's eyes.

"Deal."