Epilogue
Nathan comes back to them alike, indeed, to a whipped dog, tail between his legs and utterly pathetic. Mara watches him approach from her position at the water line, tasting Audrey's despair and finding it the sweetest flavour of all. Her back burns with fiery pain from where his creations tore it up, via William, and even though he did come back, she is far from happy with him.
They are here to steal a new boat, and this spot is nowhere near where they left the other, but he knew to find them here, and that suggests some of what they had tried to build in him two days ago has taken root, after all.
The fleeting sense of his emotions that she receives is strange, but then, he's usually strange. He drags his feet as he crosses the sand. The sky is grey shot with threads of soft yellow, illuminating behind him as he crests a dune.
His awareness of her extreme displeasure is painted on his face as he approaches. She keeps her hands still and gives away nothing until he gets within a few feet of her. Then she lunges and her palm cracks out. There's no aether on it, but it still marks a clear, dark handprint across his face.
"Unteachable fool! You would have me lose myself to that paltry cipher, because of you! Why will you not love me as me?!" Mara rages, losing all restraint as she shrieks at him.
He fell back when she struck him, the shock and pain of the blow too fleeting, and a memory now as he pokes his face where the darkening handprint lies. Next time, she thinks darkly, next time she needs to make his punishment hurt.
Nathan regroups and meets her rage for rage, clenches his hands into fists at his sides and yells back, "Audrey was real! She still is! You just can't stand that she's still strong enough to beat you!"
Mara inhales sharply. When her voice emerges, it echoes, resonant, through the landscape and across the water, louder than seems feasible for her lungs to achieve. "There is only! One! MARA!" She pulls it back to a hiss, oddly frightened and rocked off-balance by the power of her declaration. "There has only ever been one Mara..."
Nathan stands speechless in front of her. She clenches her own fists and thinks of him dead. What's so special about Nathan, anyway, that any part of her should love him so fiercely? She killed him once before. She's killed him a hundred times in one day. She can do it again.
"Mara..." William looks intensely worried for both of them, his eyes flickering between their stand-off. She doesn't know what might have transpired, had his beloved voice not called her back from the edge of it.
Because he did, however, the moment passes, and Mara does not strike, and Nathan lives. Again.
"We're ready to go?" William asks, his voice falsely light, a faint tremor in it. "Good! Let's get back home. We'll all feel better once we're rested... Nathan, won't you help me drag out the boat?" He looks to Mara and indicates with an elaborate and hopeful flourish of a gesture that she should climb into the boat while it's still in the shallow and lapping edges of the waves, where she can avoid getting her feet wet. His voice is strained and eager, his face a match, and his ploy transparent.
Mara sighs and climbs onto the boat, seats herself.
Pushing off, with his legs knee-deep in water, puts Nathan's head next to hers. She leans over and hisses into his ear with venom, catching hold of the lobe and twisting as Sarah once did, ripping from him a startled cry. "She's going to kill herself, next time she gets control. Herself, and all three of us. I can feel her intent right now. Your job now is to help us restrain her and keep her alive. Do you think you can get behind that?"
Nathan, obviously, can do nothing else.
When they reach the island, it's full light and Mara and William's wounds are already healed. Nathan's first act back at the castle is one of betrayal. He helps William to lock Audrey away. Mara clings on by her toenails to keep control until Nathan can modify the servants' quarters off the kitchen area, which are partially underground, into a cell, and they have such a place where her body is safe through the exchange. Nathan can't even argue a case for William to release Audrey. He doesn't want Audrey dead. He even makes the chains, padded and carefully designed against any possibility of self-damage. He sets two shadow policemen to watch her.
"You're so helpful tonight," William says, stopping to touch Nathan's face on the stairs. They're too worn out to even think about the mess of much of the downstairs of the castle. Nathan's too numb inside and out to even have registered, until that point, that they're heading upstairs. Icicles seem to grow inside him, spreading out from William's touch. Contrarily, Nathan's heart seems to expand as his body reacts. "Are you going to continue being helpful?"
Nathan swallows and nods, because it's hard to fight, and his heart and head need something, even something as twisted as William, to fill this gaping, echoing emptiness. It's not going to matter soon anyway, he tells himself. He follows William up to the bedroom, and they're both exhausted, but he doesn't resist as William buries both their grief and frustration in the union of their bodies.
Mara's absence from their bed is like a wound, and so strange that Nathan can barely parse it.
But it's not Audrey who William's chosen for his release. In the boat on the way over, Mara was ranting promises and perversions that twisted up Nathan's stomach, made him think he might vomit over the side. It was meant to be Audrey who William took to bed. But William is not able to force Audrey, unwilling and wearing his beloved's face, no matter how Mara wants and demands it. Even if he is a mass-murderer, Nathan will give him something for drawing that line.
"See? It's good, isn't it?" William pants plaintively, face buried in the back of Nathan's neck, one hand stroking his face and the other curled under his balls. "Tell me you weren't thinking about this when we were rolling on the ground earlier." Any one of the sensations assailing him would be balm for Nathan's touch-starved brain under the right circumstances, and he's tasted despair aplenty today. Somehow a new decision is made. He pushes back onto William and lets out a long groan as the sensation inside him strikes deeper. William celebrates him reacting as more than a limp doll with endless cheerful patter and praise and ridiculous words, sweet like they're real lovers, but he can't really hear any of it.
Losing himself in sensation gives him something else to focus on other than Audrey, suicidal, downstairs in chains, and the solution he somehow needs to find, and hasn't yet but for disparate threads that go nowhere. Other than the bloody images carved into his brain of the massacre at the police station and the sure knowledge that this is what Mara and William are.
He needs to deal with them and he doesn't know how.
It's not going to be by letting William fuck him through the mattress, but he claws his hands into the sheets he can't feel and rocks back against William, who he can, and lets the sex draw out untempered noises from his lips.
William's palm presses against his forehead, his face buried more firmly in Nathan's neck, teeth and breath lodged against his skin. "Oh, fuck, you're really... Is this... Is this an apology?" William sounds ready to fly off into giggles, sounds high as a kite.
Something else in Nathan snaps. If he's an active participant, he's had enough of this. Tired of groaning under William in his reluctance, in his insistence that this can't be him, can't be happening. He rolls them over, which is far from easy, with William's hips still trying to go as he moves. He jerks their bodies apart and William makes a startled noise as Nathan pins him face-down.
"Just because I'm forced to love you," he hisses in William's ear, "doesn't make you safe from me." After all, Mara loves him. "And if you must know... I think I do prefer we keep this the other way around." He grips underneath William's jaw with one hand, and the other man keeps very still, taut and tense, as Nathan controls him via controlling his access to air. Nathan makes an exploratory foray with his free hand, making William jolt and cry out. "Never done this without Mara's instruction. Sure hope I get it right, it doesn't hurt." A moment later, Nathan thrusts into William with minimal preparation.
William gasps incoherently at first, and they're close enough that Nathan feels the shudders go all the way through the other man, almost feels the pain.
Then William hisses, "Attaboy," and his hands reach back to grasp Nathan's hips.
Which is not what Nathan was expecting, but at that point he's too far gone to care.
When they finally wake, Mara berates them for leaving her chained up for hours and they're on tip-toes for yet another reason. William broods. Nathan focuses on putting the wreckage of the castle's downstairs back together, and then does hand-wash laundry, the most banal of possible tasks after the last two days. Since Sophie is gone, he follows that by making inventory of the kitchen. They need supplies, but a visit to town is the last thing he wants to encourage.
Mara turns back into Audrey and almost throws herself from the tower before Nathan's shadow policemen stop her.
William yells at her, back in the cell, wrapped again in the chains. Nathan drags him off and punches him, and Audrey's face bruises too, and Nathan sags on the floor outside the cell and thinks that it can't get worse than this. He can't hurt William. Audrey doesn't want him near her if he's not going to set her free and let her destroy herself. He stumbles away.
His feet carry him out of the castle, out onto the wind-washed island. The sky is grey, the sea is choppy, the world feels like it agrees with Audrey's assessment of their options. Wind whips his clothes around him, and although he can't feel it, it looks like it's bitterly cold.
He needs to think, and he can't think, about all of this. But he promised Duke, and more than that, back when he saw the bodies in the police station, he'd promised himself.
Audrey solved the Troubles. She told him, trying to persuade him to let her kill herself, or worse to do it for her. She fixed Duke's curse to make it, if not bloodless, at least deathless. She cited it as the reason why her work was done, why she had to die to be rid of Mara and William so that they can't undo it again, so that they can't make things worse.
Nathan can't kill Audrey. He needs... another option. He sits on a rock and buries his head in his hands and it wouldn't do anything, in his case, but he's still a little bit tempted to step off the edge of the cliff.
He thinks it wouldn't do anything. He still doesn't know how 'connected' they are, and it's not like he's had any physical marks from damage Mara or William have taken. But maybe the connection's stronger the worse the injury is? What the fuck does he know?
He climbs down to the rock pools to double check his reflection in them, ensure that he doesn't have a mark on his face where he punched William earlier, just out of a creeping, paranoid suspicion, knowing he couldn't tell.
Of course he doesn't.
The sea is dark and dour. He wonders how long it would put them back if he set the boat adrift. If they would survive the island in isolation.
The fact is that even if they can't Trouble each other, Mara and William have been around forever, and he's pretty sure they can cobble together another boat. Mara's the one who always instructed him how to make everything, back in the void. Even if she doesn't like getting her hands dirty.
It would take more than that to make the island a prison instead of a fortress.
But by the same token, they could probably survive here too. It will be harder without supply runs, and William would have no pizza, yet they have woods and vegetation, and a small number of animals, and a far more abundant number of sea birds, and of course there is the sea. They could live for a long time off the sea.
With that thought, Nathan makes nets and fishing rods, and by the time it's growing dark, he has caught supper.
Mara is Mara again back at the castle, and makes it known by screaming at him about where he's been all day. He can see her fraying, even as Audrey disintegrates in her despair. Mara hates Audrey, would deny her existence altogether, but they're still more intimately connected than even Mara and William are.
Nathan cooks the fish, struggles to force down a few mouthfuls, and leaves them both complaining about fish bones and his own ineptness.
He heads to the tower. He loves them too much to kill them, even by chance and neglect. If he's going to do it this way, he has to make sure they can survive. He's not satisfied with the water supply on the island. He needs to make some kind of rainwater collection and purification system. He sets up to work in the room at the top of the tower, makes heavy locks for the door, and shuts himself inside with Mara's gift of engineering and science books.
It's just as well Mara has had too much confidence knocked out of her to return to the mainland before she's solved her Audrey problem. Just as well, too, that William is so reluctant to succumb to her increasingly violent demands of what to do with her while she is Audrey - William is definitely averse to torture when he's also going to feel it.
It takes Nathan the next two days to make the island self-sufficient to a degree that he's satisfied with. Meanwhile, Mara's fractures spiral closer to madness, William demands Nathan in his bed when Mara isn't, and Audrey... Nathan's heart comes closer to breaking completely every time he has to face Audrey begging him for death.
Nathan won't do it.
-Nathan says he won't do it, but surely, eventually, he has to break. The situation they have cannot go on. One day she will get the chance, anyway, Audrey swears it, and when she does, she's going to end this.
At first she was terrified that William would head to the mainland and kill Duke before she had a chance to lay things to rest. But it seems that William couldn't care less about Duke. William won't do even a fraction of the things Mara demands of him any more - no more than Nathan will accede to the request that's most important to Audrey.
Both men have lines, and she - in both her guises - has found both of them.
With neither willing to break the deadlock and change the current, horrible, status quo, she wonders if they realise that if this continues, neither she nor Mara are going to come out of it sane.
Assuming they were ever that to start with.
On the fourth day, Nathan comes to her in her chains and brings aether. Just one. He holds it in his fingers and sits outside of the bars of her cell.
...And, indeed, Mara's castle has a dungeon now, built for her, by Nathan... What sweet gifts he gives.
Nathan sits and looks at her a long time, the single ball of aether resting between his fingers unremarked. They aren't really talking, after Nathan sided with William and Mara and helped them to keep her here like this. (She tries, pointedly, to ignore the memory pushing up from her brain of how she refused to kill him when their situations were reversed.) She shouted at him too often, begged him too often, and now Nathan just sits and studies her sadly. Mara gets more reaction from him than she does.
He's become so good at it that it surprises her when he speaks. "I need you to give me a Trouble. I have a plan, but we have to do it now. As soon as I tell you, Mara knows too, so this will be our only chance."
She stares at him. And he tells her.
He hid it well, but then, he had to. He could not allow her to see the smallest hint, courtesy of her enemy within.
It's jarring to be reminded how efficient he could be at hiding things from her, but her darker side knows that part of him well, has learned from experience.
"Where's William?" she asks.
He flushes almost comically. "In bed. Tired."
Audrey feels her eyes widen. It's not the first time he's used seduction as a weapon, either, but it does astonish her to think that he, what? Deliberately went out to encourage William to fuck himself into a state of exhaustion? Stole aether as he stole away from William's bed?
"Safer," he says gruffly. "Much safer than trying to tie him up and pushing him to use the goo balls. Can't knock him out if I need you awake. He sleeps when he's... relaxed. Eventually."
Audrey says carefully, "Okay. So you're going to let me go?"
"I can't kill you." He's almost begging her. "This has got to be better. Please."
He's begging her not to try to die if he gives her access to aether, options, freedom. She's been stuck in the cell for days now, without any control over what she does even when she's herself, and it's hard, thinking it over, contemplating letting him let her out and then using that chance for something other than what she's been pushing, pushing, pushing as her goal and solution.
It's a third option, a middle way, but- "It still doesn't sound much fun, Nathan," she tells him, exasperated.
"I can't kill you," he retorts. "I can't kill them. This is the only way." His body jerks in emphasis with the words, and he blinks rapidly, fighting exhaustion or tears or - she can't tell.
"But I'm supposed to do that to you," she points out. What's the difference, really, between death and living death?
He shakes his head, and his face clears, suddenly, washing clean. "Come with me, then."
"What?"
"You were in my head before... before you came back in Mara's body. Come back to me. I'll be right here. You can..."
"I have no idea how I would do that! I don't know how I did it!"
He hangs his head, and for a moment she thinks that's the death of the idea, the death of any remaining hope, and she's sorry. Then he says, with force, "Try. It's a chance. That's got to be better than nothing, even if it's only when Mara's asleep, like before. I don't know how aware I'll be - maybe we'll just dream together. But we'll be together."
She continues to stare at him and moves closer to the bars, not knowing how to express any of what she's thinking or feeling in words.
"It has to be this. If Mara can get to me, she can undo it. She can make me undo it." He reaches a hand through the bars, and it's shaking so much he can barely target her face. He strokes her cheek with his fingertips and rasps, voice as unsteady as his hand is, "It's the closest to a fairytale ending we're going to get."
The closest Mara and William are, too, Audrey thinks, with resentment because they don't deserve it. They deserve pain and death and nothing, not a castle on an island, and their love for each other and all the time in the world, with Nathan looking after them even in absence.
Nathan could never kill them, though. And only this way does he take them out without destroying her, and thus himself.
Audrey takes a shaky breath because she's been so angry with him these last days that it's almost taken over her world, left her blind and breathless and wrecked beyond tears. A few slip out now, unbidden, impossible to hold back. "This is no fairytale." She lifts her hand to place it on top of his. His eyes are blue and half-crazed, and she wanted to save him, give him his freedom. This isn't that. But maybe it's too late... Too late for them both. He's sinking, even as she is. Maybe this is the one way they have to save each other.
"Come with me," he says again, and this time she answers, "Yes."
He presses the black ball of aether into her palm. She feels the tears slip down as she rolls it to crush it between his hand and hers, and leans her face forward, pushing her cheeks against cold metal to kiss him through the bars.
His hand in hers, her hand within his. This one isn't an imposition, it isn't something she's inflicting on him.
It's a partnership.
He clutches her through the bars and the power gathers, waiting coiled and ready, poised. "I'm thinking..." she whispers, against his lips, then kisses him again.
She can do this. It's more complex than anything she's done, but maybe Mara's on-board for it, too. Audrey can feel her stirring, and it isn't resistance. She doesn't think Mara can focus on anything right now other than wanting Audrey out of her head. After all, she cannot do anything, conquer any worlds, until Audrey is gone. The trap probably sounds sweet to her now.
Two pre-existing Troubles to merge into this one, and some new additions besides. Things shift inside Nathan, under her palm, and she's so scared she's going to hurt him, that it's going to go wrong. There's such a mess of aether in him already that she feels she's only going to entangle the wrong parts. But the knowledge rises in her with the will - twofold, maybe.
"I'll see you on the other side," she says, and peels her hand away to leave her mark on his palm, a perfect imprint of her smaller hand within his, forever. She feels Mara shift, violently, then feels an odd jolt and hears a noise behind her, low down.
As she's turning, she steps back toward Nathan, only to find her body - Mara's body - unconscious at her feet and that Nathan is right behind her, because she has stepped through the bars.
"Nathan!" she swings around on him. She only dimly remembers those ghostly days. Hadn't anticipated the weird way this feels.
He's nodding slowly. His eyes are wild, face ragged. "I'd thought the top of the tower," he says, "but maybe here's as good as anywhere. We need to get Mara out, though."
He's hanging by a thread against his new Trouble taking hold. He was primed for it, ready. He's not going to make the top of the tower. She can feel it as he stumbles to unlock the cell, struggles to unlock the chains, and then unsteadily lifts the body that is no longer Audrey's across his arms. He carries it out past the bars, then out of the room entirely and leans down to rest it gently on the floor just beyond the threshold.
Audrey sees him lay his hand across Mara's brow, and dip his fingertips under the strands of her hair, stealing one last touch.
Then he closes the door and closes them in. They don't need to be in the cell, but there's a bench there, so he goes inside to lie down. He is lurching on his feet and Audrey can't help him. Her ghostly hands pass right through.
There's a shout and a bash on the door Nathan just locked, as Mara comes back to herself, and of course she'll stop this before the plan can be brought to full fruition, if she can.
"Audrey." Nathan's tone draws her attention back to him fast. His eyes are bleeding some transparent substance that glitters like diamond and isn't tears, or isn't only tears. His hand is blindly reaching for her, up from the bench.
Audrey takes a breath she probably doesn't need, "Goodbye, Mara. Enjoy your island kingdom," she states aloud with some force. Nathan's body is coating over with the substance, like it's seeping from the pores of his skin, too, thickening all the time, stiffening his form where he lies. Like Albert Hutton, he'll have no communication with the world outside, but he can take her in with him.
She isn't sure if she can still feel Mara dancing on the edges of her thoughts. Maybe it's just her imagination, after it seemed like a constant for so long.
Nathan's hand has already gathered such a thick coating it looks like it's been crystallised in ice. Audrey reaches down and takes it before he can't move any more, to rest it back upon his chest in a position that looks comfortable.
There's a small window along the top of the wall opposite them, and through trees she can see a clear view of the sky as a glistening wall rises up. No ephemeral barrier like Albert Hutton's, and no invisible forcefield any more. Nathan's make and forcefield Troubles were sacrificial parents to this one, to create to contain the two things his life revolves around now; the things he loves and hates and can't destroy.
It had to be solid, real material substance in this world, to keep Mara and William in.
"It's working," Audrey tells him.
"I know." It's barely a mumble. His eyes are set closed, forced down by weight of crystal. His lips almost can't move. Her hand is coated over in crystal, on top of his hand, on his chest. "Come to sleep with me."
Audrey doesn't know if it's oblivion together or eternity together, in whatever worlds of his own Nathan can cook up inside his head. But it's together either way.
She curls up into him, and lets herself disappear.
In ten years time, a child will run, laughing, along these cliffs on the edge of Tuwiuwok Bluff. She will stop, here, hide from her brother behind that tree with the hole in it. She will happen to look out to sea, and the day will be just clear enough, and the contrast of sky and sea will be just strong enough, and she'll spy-
"Mommy, daddy!" she'll yell, forgetting all about the game. "There's a castle and an island made of crystal, out to sea! It's a princess castle! Look! Look!"
(Her brother will pound into her and yell, "Got you!" and there'll be a minor skirmish before the game is agreed void.)
A tall man with greying long hair will sprint the last several steps up the bluff to separate his children, his expression a little grimmer than they might expect, and his eyes, less sharp than theirs these days, will search the sea for the substance of their report.
Looking out at that castle, encased in its crystal wall, he'll remember heading out on a boat with the Chief of Police and a dozen angry men with guns, ten years back, having fought to be there at all, precious commodity as he'd recently become. Only they found in their way a crystal wall, smooth and hard as diamond, impossible to scale. Deep beneath the sea, when the divers went down, it was riddled with holes to let the tide breathe, but never big enough to permit a person passage through.
The island lay locked-off and unreachable.
As it's remained ever since.
...And Mara and William, presumably, will be still behind that wall; ten years down the line with not a whisper from either of them, best guess will still be that they can't get out.
Maybe Duke will never know how they did it, but Nathan and Audrey did it, keeping Haven safe ever since.
He'll turn, on that bluff ten years hence, to greet the last member of their party, panting from the run, her staggering arrival accompanied by the plaintive protest, "You guys!"
"There's a castle." Joannie will pout and point again. "A castle, mommy."
Then Jennifer, too, will look, narrow her eyes against the sun and squint a sideways challenge for Duke's mouthed warning and his reticence, and say, "Yes, darling, there is a castle."
"A princess castle," their daughter will insist-
-as their son snorts and counters, "Maybe it's an evil castle. With an evil queen! Did ya even think of that?"
Jennifer will sigh and say, "It's a little more complicated, kids. Let's go home." She'll elbow Duke as they reel in the children, and hiss, "It's time we told them, at least a little of it. You know it is."
...For Joannie just turned nine and Johnathan is seven, and there is still work out there in the world for the blood they both carry to do.
Later, with the children sleeping, the home they moved into after the Cape Rouge failed to survive a storm cloaked by night, Jennifer will sit down next to Duke, who's sought uncharacteristic refuge in a (really good) bottle of wine and she'll ask, "Do you think he's still alive out there? Do you think they are?"
And Duke will say, "I have no fucking clue." He'll hand her the bottle with its inch and a half of liquid velvet far-too-expensive-to-drink-like-this wine, and raise his glass.
They'll drink to the lost, Duke half collapsed across his armchair in a restless grief devoid of answer, Jennifer in contemplative silence with her lips poised around the bottle's rim.
Under the covers, their children will make whispered stories about the hidden island off the coast of Haven, with its castle, and the princess and the evil queen both trapped there, behind impenetrable walls.
THE END
ENDNOTE: In my head, at least (it's all theories and ideas and not a single written word so far), this is part #2 of 3. I have even weirder places I think this concept can go. Part #3 would pick up in 10 years or more so, yeah, at least in my head, this is not the end, just a temporary stopgap like the Barn.