NOTES: The usual apologies for any Science harmed in the making of this fic. I tried to align the explanation of Audrey's injury with current thought upon the workings of the brain insofar as I could determine from a sea of vague and unhelpfully contradictory articles what that was. Although, all things considered, Audrey has to be a special case anyway.
PART 2
Lately, the darkness always had a face in it. One face, but recurring endlessly.
It was her own face. Not twisted, not scary, but different. The eyes that were looking out from it weren't her eyes, weren't anything like her eyes. And that was terrifying.
Audrey had waited so long to find out who she really was.
She is walking down the street and the face of the stranger within leers off every window, every car's polished bodywork, every reflective surface.
...Variations on the same theme every night, to the point where she was starting to jump at her own reflection when she was awake.
Before Malcove's Trouble, she had been starting to remember Lucy. Lucy had come with headaches and odd dreams, warnings from the man she'd come to know as Agent Howard. She hadn't told Duke and Nathan, she'd told Claire... who was dead now. She wished she could talk to Claire and not some stranger about the emptiness and oddness and sense of loss inside of her head. About forgetting Lucy, post-Malcove, when she'd had that sense Lucy was just on the tip of her mind, before. She still knew the things she'd already remembered, but only from the... the memory of remembering them. When she reached down into where that familiar well of memory ought to be, the resource that had been Lucy's little knot of presence inside her head, there was no longer anything there.
Like her ability to play the piano, which had flowed instinctively from her fingers, and was now gone.
She rolled over in the darkness, her knee brushing against Duke's ass, his hair trailing over her arm. After Malcove, he'd succumbed to her offhand post-coital urging to grow it longer, or perhaps that was just the other Duke asserting himself. Both men had their own echoes of other lives, now. He didn't stir as she pressed herself into the back of his shoulder. Nathan was breathing loudly on the other side of Duke, dead-tired after his early morning and long day.
Goddamn it, she was going to get some sleep tonight, and not be ratty and irritable with them both while she... avoided her appointment, tomorrow.
She shut her eyes and pressed her arms around Duke like a teddy bear.
Sometimes the dreams got much worse.
"This body is mine." Hollow footsteps herald the appearance of not just a face looming out of the darkness, but a whole Audrey. This Audrey is the crux, more complete than the rest, the disembodied fragments of which are like roadkill, this time, strewn around her mind.
"Did you kill them?" Audrey asks, and even though she knows that in the real world she's lying sleeping in this body and it's hers, in the dream she's cut off-mid chest, a floating head and arms, no more complete than any of the others. Half a thing, unreal, incomplete.
The face of the whole Audrey distorts in rage, eyebrows pressing down, eyes filling with hate... or more thoroughly letting out the abundance of hate that they were windows for from the start. "Did I kill them? You killed us! And for what?"
Audrey has no legs to outrun her and can only flail back with her arms as the other woman tears into her. "Stop! Stop! I didn't do this on purpose-!"
Audrey jerked out of the dream, breathing heavily, crying tears into Duke's hair.
"Just a nightmare," she mumbled over her sleeping lovers.
But she didn't think it was a nightmare. She had other people inside her head, and they were angry.
That one wholler, stronger doppelganger, who was she? This terror she felt, the way her heart rate spiked and sweat broke out on her skin whenever she touched the presence of the other within, was this a product of the physical damage, or of who that person was?
All along, she'd wanted so badly to know who she was, beneath the memories of the Audrey Parker she knew was another person entirely, the memories she knew were false. But this presence was insidious and spiteful and even... though she was not even sure she believe in the concept of it... evil.
"She can't hurt me," she whispered into the dark. "It's only a dream. Whatever she is, she's only in my unconscious, and she says she's dying."
Not a comfort: Audrey did not want a corpse in her head.
Let alone dozens.
"I didn't kill them," she hissed at the presence inside, willing it to listen. "Lock killed them. The fall killed them."
She pressed her lips closed. Duke and Nathan didn't stir. The illuminated letters on Duke's alarm clock said it was 3:44am.
"I'm going back to sleep now. Leave me alone."
The corpses she's surrounded by this time are far less abstract. She too has a body, naked like all of the strewn dead ones, the exact mirror of all the strewn dead ones. The only thing that differs is the hair. She knows Lucy as much by the scar on her foot, though; the others don't have that.
Except maybe one. The malevolent presence always looks however Audrey looks now. Five days ago she had her hair fixed, and the entity that haunts her dreams changed hers, too.
Audrey steps barefooted through the sea of identical corpses. Lucy's grabs her ankle and looks up at her with dead eyes and says, "I thought you were going to remember me."
She pulls her ankle away, shaking. "I'm sorry. But I've met Lucy Ripley. She's still alive and well."
Not much of a defence. What is she, if you take out the memories of Audrey Parker, which she knows aren't real?
"There must be someone in there," Duke said, when she'd asked him, posing it as a theoretical one day at breakfast. When it came to theories of life and death and the nature of the universe, she asked Duke, because Nathan always just told her what he thought she wanted to hear. "We met her in Malcove's world, when she didn't have Audrey Parker's memories. And she was you. She was exactly the same as you."
That's the one thing she clings to. She is not one of these dead and discarded things, but herself even without the memories that were put into her to make her so.
The corpse field is still very, very unsettling.
She could count them all and commit them to memory, trace them back through the new information from the Teagues. If her unconscious is going to throw horrors at her, Audrey thinks, she might as well make use of them.
As if her decision prompts them to action, the bodies start to rise around her.
It's not some zombie apocalypse or horror cliche. It's worse. They were people. In their eyes, they're still people, still her through distorted glass. Broken, in need, desperate, betrayed...
Audrey's mind blanks as their grabbing hands reach for her. Is this the truth of death, or is it Garland, cracking gruff jokes and rearranging Nathan's life again because he can?
Audrey shuts her eyes in the dream and tells herself to wake up, but when she opens her eyes she's still there, and the trick that's worked before is apparently refusing to work now.
"That body is mine." The woman with Audrey's features and the terrifying eyes stalks through the grasping past identities. She shoves them aside like they're nothing, until she can reach through them to Audrey's shoulders. "You stole it!"
Her nails dig into the skin and Audrey screams as they tear down in strips, peeling her back to an open wound. She fights, but the doppelganger gets its claws in again and tears off more strips. The pain weakens her and makes it even harder to fight while her alternate strips her down.
"Why are you screaming?!" the woman demands, screaming back in her face. "Useless! This is useless! There's nothing there I can use!"
Audrey looks down through tears of agony and sees, in place of the torn-off skin, not exposed flesh and muscle fibre, but just... vacancy. She can see straight through her chest to the floor. The woman with her face has excavated down through the outer layer of Audrey Parker, but there's nothing underneath.
"You're useless to me! I can't wear that!" The ghoul shoves Audrey as she shouts the accusation.
...Lucy grabs her ankle from the floor.
There's not much left in Lucy. She's slack and boneless, mostly dead, no anima in her expression. She was always nothing more than a shell. Nothing more than Audrey is. Yet she made a decision, and clings to the ghoul-Audrey's leg and starts trying to climb up it, hampering her, staggering her, almost pulling her down.
Audrey looks down at herself again and this time sees the strips of skin starting to curl back in over the void, and she gasps... The gaps are filling with the ghost of flesh again. That's not necessarily a good thing. The agony returns as her body reforms, because being alive hurts.
"They're not nothing," Audrey grits, stepping back, looking at her mirror image. "I'm not, either! I think they were already mostly dead. I think the one who's been destroying what's left of them is you. Who are you?!"
In reply she gets laughter, raucous, disjointed, cruel... and filled with despair. "Me? I'm the only thing in your head that's real! But not for much longer. You're brain dead. Brain dead, you do-gooding, Trouble-solving little fool. You're a nothing! Without me you're nothing!"
Chills sweep Audrey, replacing the sensation of pain. She looks down again and her body... or facsimile of one... is complete again.
"Who. Are. You?" she asks again, determinedly gritting each word, because the scene is starting to swim in and out and she thinks she's losing hold of the dream. Or it's losing its hold upon her.
"Mara," spits the other Audrey, in rage. "Our name is Mara. You might as well know, since you're my funeral."
"Nathan!" Something was rocking him fiercely enough that he might fall out of bed. Was the Cape Rouge in a storm? Nathan blinked his eyes open. "Nathan!"
"Duke-"
It seemed as soon as he was awake, Duke's rough hands and insistent voice had no attention for him. Duke had turned back to Audrey, on the other side of the bed.
Audrey, sitting up with something in her face, in her eyes, that wasn't like Audrey at all.
Instantly, Nathan was wide awake and shooting bolt upright next to Duke, yanking the earphones from his ears. Not again-
"I suppose I have to at least commend that bitch's physical taste - and appetite - in claiming two such specimens," 'Audrey' sneered at them, her eyes sliding over their naked bodies like a stranger's lewd inspection. Her finger lifted, pointing, hovering between them. Her bare thighs straddled the bed, more aggressive than suggestive. "But you..." Her finger settled on Nathan. "What a boring little gift you have. What a miserable, failed experiment."
Nathan stared back at her, down the length of the finger. He searched her eyes for the Audrey he knew, but there was nothing of her in there. "Audrey...?"
"No. And you." Her hand whipped across to Duke. "An unexpected mutation? A happy accident for the town elders to utilize? Or... are you even one of mine? I don't recognise that!Though... yes, indeed I can see where you might have your uses."
"Why...?" Duke was visibly shaken, floundering, and when he came up, what he asked was, "Why is Nathan a failure?" He ignored the part about himself.
'Audrey's' face screwed up. She leaned in close and hissed in Nathan's face, "It was supposed to make you stronger."
Nathan blinked, and then, as Audrey's eyes turned vacant and rolled back, as her eyelids slid closed and her body slumped, he caught her.
He checked the pulse of the one person in the world whose pulse he could check. "She's alright... It's like last time... She's just sleeping now." He did a double-take as she started to snore softly.
"Asleep," Duke confirmed wryly. "It's almost 6AM. Wake her up."
Nathan sighed and didn't argue. They had to do this sometime, and it had been blatantly obvious that Audrey was intending to find a reason to duck out on the appointment today. She had to know there were good reasons that she could not. They needed to tell her what had just occurred.
Last time... could have been nothing. A blip, a dream, a product of a sleep disorder. Sleep-talking, sleep-walking, something like that. Maybe that could happen after a bang on the head? But this had been someone else wearing Audrey's skin. Talking to them intelligently. About relevant things, information that apparently Audrey herself did not know.
Nathan rubbed her face gently. "Wake up, love... Audrey... wake up."
He wasn't expecting her eyes to open misted with tears and hazy with pain, but when they were he was glad he'd woken her.
They greeted the morning sitting on Duke's deck with a spectacular sunrise. It was edging into winter now, but Audrey said the bite of the morning's temperature was welcome, and it had been Duke's idea when he'd done a check outside and seen the view.
"She said her name was Mara. My name... is Mara," Audrey said, whose narration of her dream had overtaken their own intentions.
"Your name is Audrey," Nathan said.
Audrey shook her head. "Whatever this entity inside my head is, that's the original me. The person I always wanted to know more about, to reclaim, to be again."
Duke shook his head far more emphatically. Nathan hadn't altogether been expecting the support. "Your name is Audrey. That's all you need to know."
They exchanged a look, acknowledging their position on the same page. The person they had spoken to had been anything but benign. Audrey's dream had definitely not been benign.
"I'm absolutely sure you don't want to be this person," Duke asserted. "You're you, and we love you, and that is all you need to be... Sunshine." Duke leaned over and kissed her hair, and pointed her gaze at the sunrise. "That's you. You're my sun. Pretty sure you're Nathan's." He straightened, but kept stroking the back of her neck. Audrey curled her hand around his wrist.
"Thanks, but she says she's dying, anyway." Audrey's eyes glittered with more tears at that admission, though she blinked hard and didn't shed them. "I think... she's the thing that the Barn is tied to. She said... she said I'm brain dead." A helpless laugh for the absurdity of the statement escaped her. "I know. I'm sitting here talking to you, right? Yet the doctor who read the scan results said... He said the damage looked far more extensive on the scan than the level of function I was displaying."
"We will find another way," Nathan said. "We don't need the Barn. We will find another way and you'll get to stay with us." He knelt down by her knees, placed his hand on one. She put the other hand on his head. He could feel the trace of contact through his hair to his scalp. Not quite touch, but to a certain degree he could feel the pressure because it was her hand doing it.
Duke cleared his throat.
Audrey stilled and looked at him. "Okay, what is it? Because I know you guys were getting weird before I even told you about my dream. Was I... screaming in my sleep, or something?" She laughed uncomfortably, dismissing it, but Nathan knew then that she'd been screaming in her dream, and his heart clenched.
"She's... not good," he rasped. "The one in your head. I don't think she's a good person. She isn't like you."
Audrey stared.
Duke sighed. "We spoke to her, Audrey. She was... I woke up, and she was there, in your body, sitting up in our bed and spouting... well, various accusations I won't go into. But after I woke Nathan up, she talked to us about our Troubles. It sounded like she knew about Nathan's Trouble of old, and it and all the rest of the Troubles were inflicted deliberately, maybe even by her."
Nathan blinked. The words he'd heard, when he replayed them, did indeed suggest that possibility. It hadn't been what he was focused on at the time.
"She was in control?" Audrey demanded, her face wounded and astonished and annoyed. "Not just in my dream? She was here? You spoke to her?"
"She says you've got good taste. Which is obvious."
Audrey glared. "Tell me. Tell me what she actually said, word for word."
When they'd done that, Audrey sat and gulped at her coffee silently, pushing both their hands away when they tried to offer comfort. Nathan took himself over to the side of the ship, staring at the sunrise reflecting on the water, wondering how any of these answers could be true. Vince had told her, them, that she was always the same person glowing out from within, no matter whose name she wore. How could that be the bitter, vicious person who'd so blithely catalogued himself and Duke as nothing more than their Troubles, less than an hour before, in their own bed?
"It happened in the dream," Audrey said, suddenly, her voice a little rough as she broke the silence. "When she took the body. But... she said there was nothing there for her. Because she's dying. She couldn't keep control. I took it back. I don't think there's any danger of her taking over, guys."
"No," Duke said slowly. "But... we really think that you need to come to this appointment today."
Nathan quickly moved back to them, taking her hand again, relieved and grateful when she reached for him even as he was reaching out to her. She hugged his hand in her lap. "It could tell us what to expect, what to look out for, if Frank can tell us what's physically happened... happening.. inside your brain. And..." Nathan coughed. "He's encountered the Troubles before. I think he always knew there was nothing physically wrong with me."
"Okay," Audrey said with a sigh. "Point taken. But we had better check everything's all right at the station before we go. You know there's going to be a Trouble lined up for today."
Garland was at the police station, behind Nathan's desk. The two police chiefs raged at each other while Audrey clamped her nails hard into Duke's arm against his offer to go fetch popcorn.
"You said you weren't going to do this!" Nathan yelled. He could hit quite a volume when he felt like it. "This is my desk now, you said you wanted that! You're - you're dead! You can't just come back and take up where you left off! You said you understood!"
"Turns out I'm 'lost at sea' - yeah, Dave told me that. I guess that means I can get 'found' any time I please." Garland let his confrontational pose last an extra second before he dropped it. "Shit, kid, I'm just gonna do this today. Heard you had business out of town and, well, Haven needs someone to be on this. Since I'm back here right now it might as well be me. How 'bout you scoot and take your day off. So I'm back. Well, later you can tell everyone I was living it up on tropical shores with memory loss and went and retired back there again after my visit. Hawaii, maybe, like that other fellow."
"Hawaii," Nathan repeated blankly, subdued by the misstep, and Duke couldn't help but suspect that had been Garland's intention.
"They know how to fish and they know how to drink, and that sounds good to me. They got earth tremors already, right?"
"They're got volcanoes."
"Nathan," Duke said, pointedly. "Let's go." Because they could not afford to get caught up in some epic Wuornos discussion about Garland's imaginary retirement while Garland ran rings round Nathan the way he could because he'd been doing it since Nathan was five. Garland screwing with them was also a discussion that needed to be had, but perhaps with Nathan in private first.
"Come on," Audrey added. "Hell, if we have to take a day off, at least this way we have cover."
Duke supposed the difference between them was that Audrey had actually liked and worked with the old Chief, whereas Duke viewed him mostly through the lens of the relationship between prey and its predator. Garland had been busting him for one thing or another almost as long as he'd been managing Nathan.
"We've got Dwight," Nathan said through grit teeth. "Dwight is perfectly adequate back-up."
"Dwight, yep." Garland ticked that off on his fingers and scrubbed himself a note. "Need to touch base with Dwight."
"Nathan..." Duke intoned with steadily more desperation.
Nathan looked back and then tore himself away, his movements quick and angry. He stormed out of the room ahead of Duke and Audrey, leaving them to catch up.
"Bye," Duke said blandly, and Audrey managed to inject more civility into her own farewell as they took off at a half-run to catch up with Nathan.
"I'm being... I'm being goddamned usurped by my father's ghost," Nathan growled, gesturing angrily with both hands and finally dragging them down next to his sides, clenched tightly into fists.
"We will deal with Garland later," Audrey said.
"He's not going to need long to re-establish his power base. It'll be like trying to oust a monarch!"
"Nathan," Duke said. "This is important, too, remember. You were the one emphasizing how important this was, before... well. Garland."
"You can also stop listening to the recording," Audrey said. "Nathan, the control of this situation is entirely with you."
Nathan's face wiped blank, and when he recovered, he acted like Audrey had never spoken and turned to Duke. "Of course it's important. I'm sorry." He looked back to Audrey, who rolled her eyes but said nothing more on the subject. Not even when Nathan was plugging his earphones back in and pressing 'play' on the way back out to the car.
They were travelling in Nathan's Bronco, though Duke was kind of wishing now that they'd brought his own truck, since he seemed to be the only one of them today who was on anything like a level emotional keel. Still, Nathan's driving tended to be boring-ass old lady driving even when he was riled up, and today proved no exception.
Audrey opted to sit with Duke in the back, leaving Nathan alone up front. "I hate this," she said. "But I'm tired and I might fall asleep, and if I do, I don't want the person driving the vehicle to be the one sat next to psycho-Mara."
"Thanks for that," Duke said. "Nominated to restrain the psycho. Check."
"Plus, you I can use for a pillow," she added.
"It's happened once, maybe twice," Duke said. They'd told her about the other time, the one they'd been sufficiently uncertain about to waver on telling her before. After all, there'd barely been any dialogue, and it had only been a few seconds that time, even if both men had had an instinctive recoil from her and sense of not Audrey that was made stronger, in retrospect, by the more alarming and complete instance. "I'm sure there's not a big chance of it happening again."
"Better safe than sorry." She hunched herself up small, drawing her legs up, and chewed on her finger. On the one hand it looked adorable, but on the other, it looked uncertain, and Duke was not used to that. In fact, on some level, the thought of Audrey Parker uncertain was freakin' terrifying.
The Troubles were unravelling, the cycle was broken, and Audrey thought it was down to the broken contents of her head. Duke couldn't dispute the theory, not really. She was at the centre of this, of whatever the Troubles were, and always had been. He was still getting to grips with the terrifying fact of there not being an end to it, especially in context of his own damn Trouble.
Couldn't clear out of town at the prospect of the Crocker Curse becoming an essential commodity, either. Audrey wasn't leaving, Nathan wasn't leaving, and he was... stuck with them. Part and parcel.
A treacherous little core of him wanted Garland back in charge, wanted Audrey so disheartened she might be persuaded to walk away, wanted to engineer a situation where he could drag them both far away with him. But his rational brain knew it would break both of them, and he'd rather break his own heart and body and mind on the Crocker Curse than allow that.
"C'mere..." He jogged his hand at Audrey, who cast him a sceptical look. "Well, Nathan's driving, so I guess we will be inviting the usual bitching about seat belts, but it's a long journey."
"I said I might sleep, I don't want to sleep," she said, head shaking.
"You didn't get much last night," Duke reasoned, "and I am right here, and I promise, if I see any sign of disturbance, or the nightmares, I will wake you. On the instant."
She waggled a finger at him, a sharp recall for a moment to 'Mara', but they hadn't mentioned the tic of body language. "I am way too keyed up to sleep, but I will snuggle. Nathan, not a word about seatbelts." She unhooked hers and drew her legs up, shuffling across the back of the Bronco, draping her shoulders against Duke's side.
Five minutes later, she was miles away, and they were not so many miles away as they should be if they wanted to get to this appointment. "Can you speed it up a bit?" Duke asked, kicking the back of Nathan's seat. "You still drive like Granny Shaw." Wasn't surprising, since Nathan had had such a huge spat with his dad back when he'd first got the Bronco that it had been Bill Shaw's grandma that taught him.
Come to think of it, Nathan's whole history seemed to have been composed of arguments with his dad. Duke kind of wondered, as the car speeded up, and Nathan lifted a hand from the wheel to flip him off, how anyone had thought that would change as a result of Garland coming back from the dead.
Nathan switched on the radio after a while, some country and western station that resulted in a few Soggy Bottom Boys style renditions of whatever howling tune was the DJ's pick as both of them fell back into the old rhythm. Nathan had a good voice, though God forbid he bring it out under any normal circumstances, when he wasn't doing his best to make a sound like cats.
"Duke," Nathan's voice intruded on Duke's consciousness a while later. "Duke!" His voice was sharper, and the car lurched as he deliberately slewed it side to side.
"Gyah...! What?" Duke flailed out his arms and just about managed not to knock Audrey off his lap.
"You can't wake her up if you're sleeping. Besides, you know you're supposed to be the designated entertainment."
"She's fine." Duke stroked Audrey's hair back, confirming the words. "Maybe this Mara only comes out at night?"
Lucy takes her hand and they both stand over the wreckage of a piano like they're at a funeral. There's nothing under their feet and the piano hangs held by nothing in a dark void. Lucy is voiceless, dark eyes hollow, face pale, skin transparent. Her lips part but nothing comes out. Her eighties clothes look more faded than ever.
Audrey, who still has a voice, uses it to say, "I can learn to play. I already have the piano. I can learn to play it again."
She clasps Lucy's hand hard in both of hers and receives a phantom smile...
"Audrey." That was Duke's voice.
"No," she said, protesting too late. It wasn't one of the bad dreams... at least, not like that.
"We're here," Duke's voice said.
But it was too late, and Audrey was pretty sure that, in any case now, Lucy was gone. Lucy was gone but at least she had a way to honour and resurrect her, in a small part. "...I need to take piano lessons," she murmured.
"But you can play the piano," Duke protested.
"No," she said, feeling faintly weird about admitting it at last. "I can't."
She didn't explain, but Nathan said, "Ellie Inghams from the pottery class plays piano. I can ask her." Nathan was pulling the Bronco into the lot in front of a bland, flat-roofed building which seemed to have more grassy verges between the parking spaces than it had parking spaces. Audrey wondered again what this appointment was costing them. All Nathan had ever told her when she asked was not to worry.
An hour later, she was sitting in a waiting room - yet again - and ready to kill whoever next dared say the words 'another test'.
Dr Abernathy ventured back out of his room with his brow scored with a 'V' of perplexity beneath his curly white head of hair. He nodded absently at Nathan, who was studying a decorative oriental plant over in the corner, and frowned at Duke where he was poking at the vending machine. (He affected an innocent expression, but Audrey knew he hadn't had any change on him, and Nathan didn't after Garland's candy-spree yesterday, but Duke had had or handed over at least four candy bars that she'd seen.) Dr Abernathy ambled over to Audrey. "You, my dear, are an extraordinarily fortunate young woman."
She blinked back at him and said, with a certain degree of threat, "What?"
He wafted a hand at the door. "We should - Are Nathan and Mr Crocker coming along? Yes?" He looked to her for confirmation. "Very well." He stood back and kept waving for them until they all trooped into the indicated room ahead of him.
Nathan assured her that this guy was not so ineffectual as he looked.
"She'll be... all right, won't she?" Nathan wavered at the door, hanging back with Abernathy for spoilers, and got tsked. But Audrey thought Nathan had already got what he wanted in everything about Abernathy's reaction to his question. His face was more relaxed as he came in and sat down, joining her and Duke on the big leather sofa. With Nathan holding her hand on one side, and Duke's hand on her leg on the other, she had to wonder what that looked like to the Doc. She didn't particularly give a shit if it looked like something he didn't like, though.
"Lucky," she said to Nathan. "Apparently, I'm lucky."
"Indeed!" Abernathy said exuberantly, recapturing all their attention. He fumbled with a scan from his desk, and attached it to a nearby board, then pointed with the end of a pen, affecting a manner that made Audrey feel like she was back in school. "This area of your brain... see how it's darkened, just here? This is the frontal lobe. It's somewhat of a myth to say that only certain areas of the brain perform particular functions or contain particular parts of us, but it is at least believed to hold the majority of our formative experiences, our memories... and it performs numerous other functions besides. In your case, the damage it's taken appears to have rendered the area almost completely nonfunctioning..." He cast her a meaningful look.
Duke choked, and then she had the full, startled attention of both of her men, their eyes filled with alarm.
Abernathy frowned at them before returning to her. "Audrey, my dear, your function tests, to all intents and purposes, are normal. In outward result, at least. However, when you access your memories under scan, the appearance is eccentric. Your long-term memory, and the rest of the functions we might expect to light up here in this damaged area, appear to exist in... well, in a number of scattered places around your brain. But not in this damaged place. You see?"
Audrey stared.
"She's abnormal?" Duke said blankly. "Abby Normal?" She punched his shoulder before he got any further with the Young Frankenstein references.
"Now," Abernathy said, with a gleam in his bespectacled eyes. "The brain can be an odd place, and I cannot be absolutely sure which came first, the abnormal filing system, or the trauma and the subsequent work-around, but the continued existence of functional long-term memories strongly suggest the former. And based on what Nathan filled me in on, suggesting that, like himself, you may be a unique case, I do have a theory about that."
"It's-" Audrey almost choked the words off, not sure how to take all this in, even less sure how to voice what she wanted to ask, the certainty that had solidified in her thoughts with the proof of his science. "It's someone else, isn't it? The part that was damaged is- If I was given new memories, made into a new person at some point in the past, that original person had to be put somewhere..."
Abernathy's chin lowered slowly, his eyes grave with sympathy. "I would suggest you're alone in your head now, Miss Parker."
For a moment it took her breath away. A gut-punch. Then she laughed bitterly. "I've never felt less alone in my head. What about the nightmares?" She stopped. She hadn't told the doctor everything about those. "In my dreams, there's another woman who looks exactly like me. She keeps telling me I killed her. Duke and Nathan... last night they said she took over my body, and spoke to them."
Abernathy's eyebrows raised, and if he hadn't clued into their non-standard relationship arrangements before, he certainly had now. He took it in his stride, though. "Death throes," he said succinctly. "The brain relies overwhelmingly on communication between cells, the transmission of proteins. There are still a few dying sparks. Perhaps in a dreaming state, they can still bridge the gaps, but they are isolated and vitally cut off from the rest of the brain otherwise."
"Death throes," Audrey repeated. "If it's not dead yet, then surely what's left can be saved?!"
Abernathy shook his head solemnly, not reacting in the least to her excitement. "I have consulted with my colleague Mr Edgebarton, and he agrees with my assessment. In the existence of anything approaching normal function, to tamper with this miracle would be foolish beyond measure. I am sorry, but there is nothing to be done. If it is any consolation..." He smiled at her sadly. "I would suggest that your unfortunate mental twin saved your own function."
He paced back and forth on his feet a few moments, before turning to them again with a frown. "I know that Nathan... excuse me, Nathan." A glance toward him elicited a nod and permission to go on, and Abernathy continued. "Nathan feels nothing for no physical or psychological reason that science has been able to determine, a condition inherited from a biological father whose records I successfully managed to access and study quite recently in our relationship. I am informed even more recently that this condition is not, in fact, truly a medical condition at all." He gave Nathan a very severe frown. "Who was she, Miss Parker? The woman in your head?"
Audrey shook her head slowly. "I don't know... That's the thing. I don't know, and now it seems I never will."
"We have proof that she's been multiple other people, with their own identities," Nathan said. "What about the other... layers... of those people? Aside from the original."
"Lucy's dead," Audrey murmured. "They're dying with Mara. They must go into storage, too, when the... personality overlay... when there's no longer... when it's replaced."
"Mara," Abernathy picked out brightly. "So, we have a name. Not everything is lost."
"I need to save her," Audrey urged. "Wait, don't throw this out. Listen to me. What if I need to be this person, for something to happen that's really important to a lot of people? If I can't be her, then people are going to suffer, and maybe I can't help them as me. Could you... could you do it, under those circumstances? Could you, or your colleague, try surgery or something, to help save Mara?"
Abernathy shook his head. "At this stage, there could not be enough left to be worth saving. In the presence of visible function and stability, the prior hospital let you go. Too much time has passed now to contemplate trying any sort of... rescue. I would suggest, in any case, that all you're experiencing are echoes. Violent echoes, terrifying echoes, by the sound of things, but echoes still."
Nathan squeezed her hand tighter. "The Barn already didn't come."
Audrey reinterpreted, Too much was already gone.
"You're more important than she is," he added.
"Not if she could stop the Troubles and I can't!" Audrey returned.
"The... Troubles? An interesting term for them," Abernathy said.
"You can stop the Troubles," Duke said. "One person at a time. Just like you've been doing. Until we find another way. The Barn is not your fault. Lock and Malcove throwing you off an airship cannot be your fault. And I wouldn't trust Mara anyway. The woman looked at us like we were science projects. You're the improved version. The Barn was a shitty solution, anyway, based on sacrifice and dickishness. Just like the damn Crocker Curse."
"...That would be yours, then. I see." Abernathy reclaimed his scan from the board and puttered around at his desk for a moment before he came back and sank into a chair opposite them all. "I would ask if I can write this up for science, study more comprehensively-" He chuckled as Nathan instantly pouted and Audrey began a startled protest, and Duke grimaced. "Yes, that was always Nathan's answer, before now."
"Before...? Nathan!" Audrey looked to him sharply.
He shrugged. "Didn't seem there was anything to lose. I offered to make myself available for Frank's tests. Look..." He shook his head, trying to dismiss the significance of it. "I probably should have done it anyway, before now. I am a medical curiosity, after all." He cast Dr Abernathy an apologetic look. "And that's probably not going to change any time soon. I'm alright with that."
"He was this high-" Abernathy sketched a height above the floor with his flattened palm. "Liked showing off by stabbing himself with pencils, and the like."
"Impressed everyone but my dad," Nathan murmured.
"Hm. I remember your father. Quite the character. I... hear he's dead now."
"Er, lost at sea," Nathan murmured, "technically. Though he's talking about retiring to Hawaii."
"It's complicated," Duke said.
"You come from an interesting town," Abernathy summed up.
"You could probably pass it off as interesting if you didn't stay for very long and you drank a lot," Duke agreed.
Dr Abernathy looked back at Audrey. "Are you all right, Miss Parker? Do you need a drink of water?"
"Thanks." She wanted more the breather from his sharp gaze that sending him to fetch it provided.
"I realise it may be disheartening from a certain perspective," he said, as he handed her the glass. Up this close, beyond the light flare reflecting on his spectacles, under the grizzle and bumbling and age, he had the most penetrating eyes. How had she ever dismissed him as a silly, waffling old man? "But you really have dodged a bullet due to your unusual brain function. Even though it seems some function was temporarily affected, the more global nature of your own long-term and autobiographical memory storage allowed for compensations that I think simply wouldn't have come online in a normal brain pattern."
He shrugged and half turned his back, his attention seeming buried in the distant corners of the room, and dimensions beyond. "...As for this period of unsettlement, I think you'll be seeing positive changes within the next few days. We really are at about the end of it, I think. You are and will remain physically within normal parameters for everyday function, so far as I can tell. Though we should assuredly keep an eye on that. You can come back next week, when Nathan returns for his own test schedule." He sort of jolted back to reality to go scratch a note on the paperwork at his desk.
"He means you get to live," Nathan said, gruffly, the part pertinent to himself going over his head. That wouldn't be sentimental tears clouding his voice, would it? "You get to live, Parker. I can live with that."
"So can I," said Duke.
The question, Audrey thought grimly, not answering them, was, Could Haven?
Dr Abernathy, whatever his strengths, was categorically unable to rule out any more incidents like the one last night, as Audrey's brain sorted itself out into a new equilibrium, before the last flickers of all the people she had been exhausted themselves and died for good.
"I want them," said Audrey, sitting in the back of the Bronco with Duke again. "I want them. If it's the last chance we'll get for information from Mara or any of the others, I need to talk to them while I can. I need to sleep." She felt jittery and wired and far as could be from anything like sleep. "Maybe you need to talk to her, if we can engineer things somehow for that to happen again. She seemed more forthcoming with the two of you."
"She hurt you," Nathan protested tightly.
"I don't care," Audrey retorted. "She's the original. She has to know something. We need to know it, too!"
"Maybe it's just as well Garland came back and is set up in the Chief's office," Nathan said, "if we need to take more time out on this."
"Maybe," she said flatly.
Duke sat in the back and groaned at both of them. "Okay, we're not letting the dead dictate our lives? Seriously? We can all agree that's a bad idea, right?"
He'd sat through the weird doctor's rundown, out of his element, perhaps, but he was pretty sure he'd got the gist. Parts of Audrey's brain were still dying. There was no bringing them back. But once it was over she'd just be Audrey, all the complications gone.
Sounded good to him.
Duke had met Mara, and he had a bad feeling where trying to get closer to her was concerned. Definitely he would be loath to embrace deliberately letting that bitch out. And Nathan really needed to rein back the Garland situation before that went much further. He cursed aloud as he realised where that left them.
"Nate. You should probably go back to the station, deal with your, what are we calling it? Undead coup? Zombie pretendership? I can help Audrey."
Nathan responded with his best scowly twist of his eyebrows and crinkling forehead, coupled with the Wuornos pout. While Duke found the combo genuinely hard to resist, he was also pretty sure he had the right of it.
"We'll all go, first," Audrey said. "Find out what's happening. I want a word with the Chief, too." She took out her phone. "It's half past two... it'll be almost four by the time we get back."
Nathan fumbled in his pocket. "Damn it... I forgot to turn my phone back on after we left the hospital."
No, but he'd remembered to listen to his headphones twice while they'd been in there.
When he switched his phone on, it immediately started to ring. Nathan, ever the responsible driver, put it on the dash and found a place to pull in before he answered it. "Yeah... What's going on, Laverne?"
Duke wasn't well-positioned to see his face while he listened to the answer: even less so when Audrey leaned forward through the gap between the seats. But he got the tone of Nathan's "Uhuh... Uhuh..." loud and clear before Nathan lowered the phone and turned around to tell both of them, "There's a situation. Ray McBreen's been kidnapped."
...And it was kind of amazing how quickly Audrey Parker's personal crises got left by the wayside when there was a case to be had. Especially, apparently, this one. Also amazing how Nathan could put his foot down with so much more gusto when Crime! was waiting. It was sad, really, and Duke would feel far more free to indulge his sarcasm if it wasn't ninety-nine percent assured that this was all about those particular people and that particular shit again.
"It's the damn Rev! That woman, that woman knew what Ray could do, knew it brought the bastard back, and I had to let her go. Now they're going to bring him back again! Out of our control!"
Frankly, it was more than a little scary being trapped in the back of Nathan's Bronco with that. Even Nathan shot a few concerned glances behind him, between muted, gruff interjections like, "The Chief's there, Parker. He'll have this. He knows the Rev of old."
"This is not the Rev of old, and you need to be there," Audrey shot back at him. Her raising her voice to Nathan, of all people, was unusual enough to be jarring. "You know what he's capable of. Garland only knows the one who hid behind his socialised church front."
"Parker, relax," Nathan groaned. "It's not going to degenerate so much in an hour. The Rev had years to spout his poison."
Audrey at least stopped ranting, but she sat and fidgeted until it was driving Duke mad. Duke did think she had a point - Rev had never gone bonkers and tried to slaughter Troubled kids in front of a police audience before, and this was the post-bonkers Rev, who'd been gunned down like a dog by Audrey Parker. The man was the definition of dangerous, and if Audrey was right about who had Ray, that was alarming on whole new levels.
"We just have to hope Ray McBreen will have the sense not to tell them you recorded his Trouble," Audrey said to Nathan, tightly, angrily, after a further few minutes of travel.
Nathan took an audible breath. "I hope he'll trust that we'll get him back, and keep it to himself."
"After all, with his Trouble available on demand, they might decide they don't need him any more. I'm guessing that either goes well for him or very badly." Audrey winced. "Hopefully the Rev's people won't think to try recording it themselves. The absolute last thing we need is some semi-permanent set-up keeping that bastard out of the ground. Where he so very much deserves to be."
"It could be some other bunch of guys that took McBreen," Duke tried. "I mean, I guess you don't steal a man who can bring back the dead without wanting him to bring back the dead, but that's a pretty keen motivation for anyone that's lost someone they loved, if they found out what Ray could do."
Nathan's phone chirped an alarm and he stuck his earphones on again for a few moments before hauling them off and stuffing them away. The look Audrey directed at the back of his shoulders was hard as nails, but she kept her mouth shut for the moment.
They were driving back inside the boundaries of Haven now.
"Okay, we need to get on this," Audrey said. "Duke, you should probably be... elsewhere. There's no need to expose you to Ray's Trouble again, and absolutely not to the Rev."
"Peachy. I have a bunch of things to do back at the Gull that I should have been doing this morning, so just... drop me off where I can get my truck." He paused. "Where are you guys coming back to later, since I guess there's... not much point in asking when...?"
Audrey had a funny sort of look on her face, one he didn't like, that stalled and slowed his words. "I am this close-" She held up her pinched fingers "-to suggesting we put a police guard on you, given what the Rev's gameplan was last time."
Duke groaned. "You've got to be fucking kidding." He leaned forward in his seat to confirm that Nathan was sporting the biggest shit-eating grin Duke had seen on him in a while. "Oh, now, see what you've done? Look at that. What are you trying to do to me, Audrey?!"
"Could make it Stan," Nathan said, pulling back to a more sober demeanour fast, which meant he was taking this as a serious threat, too. "Duke, you can cope with Stan."
"I've got my own protection, thanks." Duke waggled his head sarcastically.
"Yeah, but that's protection that adds up to headlines like 'local ne'er-do-well guns down innocent honest respectable churchgoers'," Audrey pointed out.
"No," Duke said. "Seriously, no! Look at it this way: I am going back to my restaurant. I am going to be working there, all evening, in public, until my very own personal police protection show up to escort me home in handcuffs and... do dirty, dirty things to me."
"Are we doing those tonight?" Nathan asked.
"I'd settle for a discussion on whether we're doing the Rouge or the Gull tonight," Duke emphasized with a bit more force.
"Boat's more defensible," Audrey said.
"I was hoping you were planning to get him before we'd have to think about that," Duke accused. "So much for all the police posturing."
"Yeah, well, Haven PD isn't exactly a work-all-through-the-night kind of place, most of the time, and we've got about an hour of daylight left," Nathan said. "We'll try, okay?"
"Tell me you'll give up on the police escort thing. My reputation-"
"How can your reputation be anything but shot to pieces after spending the last five months fucking two cops?" Audrey demanded. "We will take you to the Gull. Where we will come back and pick you up later. And you will stay in public view at the Gull, and get Tracey to stand guard when you use the bathroom... that woman's like a rottweiller... and be careful. You of all people have got to know how much danger the Rev and his followers represent, especially to you."
Duke kept up the bitching out of a sense of duty as they drove him around, but he couldn't really argue with the point. There was a scared-sick heavy ball of cold in his stomach at the idea the Rev might come after him again, and this time find some way to make him do their dirty work of exterminating Troubles. He bit his lip on the thought that the surest way they had to force his cooperation was to threaten Nathan or Audrey.
Both of them were in their own sort of danger from the Rev's followers, and knew how careful they had to be. With a bit of luck, the Rev's people were the last in town to even know about the relationship. Okay, it wasn't secret, but wasn't like it had been printed in the paper yet either... No doubt only a temporary oversight by the Teagues. Duke wasn't sure if the hardcore group still spoke to people like Jonas, who almost certainly knew but might actually keep their mouth shut because they knew too well the bigoted contingent that made them vaguely embarrassed to be associated with their church, and what they would make of it.
He waved off Nathan and Audrey outside the Gull, then went about his evening like a man focused on absolutely anything but his own goddamn restaurant, fretting all the while, albeit not for his own skin - and no, especially not when it came to shortly after five o'clock and a bunch of HPD guys still in uniform tramped in and took a table by the door, stating that the Chief had told them to come have a drink on him after their hard day at work.
But nothing happened, nothing occurred to even jolt the cops, and apparently nothing happened with Audrey or Nathan, either, because Audrey phoned just after eight sounding frustrated and tired, to say they were heading back and would pick him up, and she'd love him forever if he made sure they had cooked food ready to go when they did.
Audrey still felt dog-tired, never mind the catch-up on sleep in the car earlier. Honestly, she wasn't sure if it was the Ray McBreen situation, or if the sleep she'd been getting just didn't have any value in terms of actual rest. Like her body was still using up energy as it sorted through the problems in her head.
The hours of the afternoon that were left proved frustratingly fruitless again. Their suspects were uncooperative and howling harrassment, and had the ear of some of the most powerful figures in the town. Ray McBreen's room had been cleared out but their suspect nurse, now off-duty, had answered her door to them all sweetness and innocence, though her eyes were hard and hateful.
There'd been a minor crisis with an unknown outbreak of contagious green spots that afternoon, and the hospital staff had been overworked and distracted, to say the least, and had not noticed Ray McBreen leave or be taken. It was Elsie Petson's Trouble, the Chief... no, damn it, Garland had filled in. Dealt with now, and they were passing it off as a joke rigged by her and a bunch of her teenaged friends.
...Audrey was absolutely not going to get used to the old man being back. Nathan was Chief, and if there were parts about that which Audrey didn't like... well. Nathan was alive, and it was his life, his job, his responsibility. They weren't going to stand by for the dead man's revolution.
Still, it felt like there was a certain pressure off as they went home that night: late, which meant that Duke would be pissed, but Garland was still installed happily in his old - in Nathan's office, playing tunes on a record player he'd dragged out of Nathan's imposed storage and contentedly sitting the night shift. "Ain't like I'm going to waste this time with sleep," he told them cheerfully as they tromped out the door.
"Hi, honey." Ten minutes later, in the entranceway of the Gull, Duke curled his arm around Audrey and kissed her firmly. He repeated the greeting with Nathan, ducked a retaliatory elbow jab with breathless laughter, and pulled his coat from a hook by the door. He reached for a stack of take-out boxes on the edge of the counter, and passed a couple off the top of the pile to Audrey. "You sent cops to watch me, Nate. Take your public humiliation like a man. Come on, let's go home."
They went, Nathan shaking his head at a few of the patrons and the minor public stir. The patrons were predominantly grinning, Audrey noticed, even if Nathan did not.
Back on the Cape Rouge, they ate in relative quiet. Audrey refused wine and Duke surreptitiously exchanged a conversation with Nathan entirely conducted with just their eyes and then put the wine away altogether.
"Today has been weirder than usual," he said, as he came back to the table.
Nathan gave a glum nod. "I wish I could raid the Good Shepherd Church. Have people bash down the door of that nurse, and every one of the Rev's old flock. We're just giving them time to make their next move. But we're a small town police force. There are still wider authorities I have to answer to, if I want to keep this job."
"I guess the resurrection of the dead crazed Reverend wouldn't work as an excuse for hauling in some of the town's most devout citizens," Duke said, bitterness dripping from the words.
"When he makes his move," Audrey grit, "I am going to establish that I killed him once and I can always just kill him again. Assuming... that I can kill him." She frowned. "Because actually..."
"Huh. Does Garland know?" Duke asked, with morbid intrigue. "Whether he can die again like this?"
"Didn't think to ask," Nathan said.
"Didn't think to ask Evi, either. It doesn't slip into the conversation well. But maybe we should avoid killing the dead people. For all we know it does something really weird. We could end up with zombie Driscoll shuffling around actually eating his follower's brains, and I do not need to see that."
"I could stand it," Audrey offered, but reneged quickly. "Okay! Alright, so dissolving Ray's Trouble is first choice. Then we will do that."
After the meal, Audrey cuddled up on one of the couches and watched Nathan and Duke going about freakishly domestic chores. Her head ached dully. There was a weird buzz, like voices were cluttering the edges of her consciousness but she couldn't quite make distinct words out.
She tried to let herself drift off; didn't pick up a book, sat still instead and listened to the clock tick and felt the distant rhythm of the waves under the hull rock her slowly. All she did was stare fixedly into corners. She'd been too active this afternoon, and now the plan to try talk to the other people in her head while they were still there was a complete bust.
It occurred to her that for a while Duke and Nathan had been subtly or not so subtly finding things to do to keep themselves occupied and leave her alone.
Duke came in, with Nathan - generally the unsubtle one - hovering at his back. "Do you... want me to try and get the meditation gear out? Try something different?"
"No," said Audrey decisively, getting up. "I want to go to bed."
She said it in a manner that made it clear the last thing she was thinking about was sleep.
She let them undress her between them, handing it over to them to do the work. Duke trailed kisses around her shoulders, down over her breasts. Pressed her by gradual stages onto her back on the bed, where he cuddled down at her side and continued the ministrations. Nathan rose between her feet, climbing up from the end of the bed as she stretched out her legs to welcome him. His hands slid from her ankles to her knees, then higher. His hair tickled as he settled his head between her thighs, and she jolted and made a noise at the first delicate lick.
"Shh," Duke said, leaning back, his arms around her. Nathan's fingers moved soothingly on skin, rubbing. Nathan took positive delight in this, like he was challenged to make her feel as special as she did him, even though that equation was so monumentally weighted. It... well. She tended to think he had to get pretty close. She moaned as he curled his tongue and Duke took her hands.
For the first time that day, her brain finally shut down on the thoughts of the dead, and the Rev, and her brain... and she didn't even think about her headache for a while.
Eventually, she had to stir herself and reach down a hand to ease Nathan away. "Enough," she mumbled, vaguely insensible. "Come up here and join us."
Once he did, she pulled at his clothes and he let her tug off his shirt, though he had to be more proactive about wriggling from his jeans and underwear, struggling to remove them from around the crotch area. What he'd been doing - that much sensation was easily enough to make him hard on its own. But he just gave a soft moan as he settled at her side, and his erection wetly brushed her thigh, resting there against her skin. He snuggled down, slipping an arm around her, and seemed happy enough like that, pressing her hand away when she made a sleepy move to reach for him. "Leave it."
She wondered what that was like for a man, to be so removed from the proof of his masculinity that it would be a welcome novelty just to feel that state of physical want, on the edge, threads of discomfort and need and everything else.
Nathan was more philosophical about his Trouble these days. He loved to feel, but increasingly it was a non-issue that he couldn't feel Duke, and increasingly, the boys were finding ways around that, or even ways to make use of it, rather than bemoaning its deficiencies.
"Do you think they'll come tonight?" Duke asked, rolling forward to pull the cover up over them: herself, sleepy Nathan - almost asleep already, in fact - and last of all huddling in underneath with them himself. "The dreams? The others?"
"I don't know." Audrey shuddered a little, because even if they were just dreams, the ones of Mara were horrible, and they'd hurt. Even more terrifying was the idea that she'd woken up with that stranger within looking out of her eyes and using her as a mouthpiece. But here like this, held between Nathan and Duke, she at least felt as safe as she physically might, in as good a place as she could be to build a defence of her psyche upon. "Looks like I'll have to take that dive down and see."