Author's Note: I'm building quite a Haven writing playlist. Please let me know if you have any suggestions. Current Nathan/Audrey favorite – "Gone, Gone, Gone" by Phillip Phillips.

The rest of the afternoon passed fairly uneventfully, except for the mysterious brown paper bag that Nathan retrieved from the kitchen before they left the station.

"What's that?" Audrey asked as she shrugged into her coat.

"What usually comes in paper bags?"

"Booze. Porn. Drugs."

"Funny," he deadpanned.

"Seriously. What's in there?"

"It's honestly killing you not knowing, isn't it?"

"Just tell me." She reached for him, and he stepped nimbly out of the way.

"No cheating."

"Spoilsport," she huffed.

He laughed, but he also relented, tipping the bag forward so she could see its contents.

"Groceries?" She'd honestly been expecting something a little more mysterious.

"I asked Stan to pick up a few things."

"Hmmm. Running the Chief's errands. What did the poor guy do to deserve that?"

"Did you really want to spend this evening in a grocery store?"

"Ugg, no. I hate shopping."

"My kitchen isn't exactly well stocked at the moment. So Stan picked up a few things on his lunch break. Because he's a friend."

"I figured we'd just grab something."

"Duke's not the only one who can feed you, you know."

She'd just been rattling his chain, but it was obvious she struck a nerve. "Wow. That was quite a tone there, Wuornos."

She watched his whole body rise and fall as he took a deep breath. "I just thought I'd make us something nice, okay. But if you want to go to the Gull—"

"I'd appreciate that," she interrupted, reaching out to settle a hand on his arm. "Really."

She could tell he was still agitated on the drive home by the way he clenched the steering wheel, his knuckles white against the black leather.

"You don't have to be jealous. Have you forgotten the past forty-eight hours? I chose you."

"I'm not jealous," he argued, but there was no conviction behind it.

"Yeah you are. And you don't have to be. I didn't mean to offend your manhood by implying I prefer Duke's cooking. It's just – he owns a restaurant. Makes sense he's pretty good at it."

"I want to be the one who takes care of you," he admitted.

She was beginning to understand where his head was at. "I'd really like to argue that I don't need to be taken care of, just on principal. But in this case I do want someone to feed me."

"You don't need anyone, I get that. Doesn't mean you don't deserve someone."

She couldn't remember anyone ever offering. She hadn't even had parents to look out for her. Her foster families made it clear she was just a paycheck and an extra set of hands for the chores. Independence wasn't a choice, it was the only way to survive. Except that had been the real Audrey Parker's life, and even though she remembered it she hadn't lived it. She didn't know if she'd ever had parents. When she might have had parents. It made her head hurt to think about, and it made something inside her ache for a normal, uncomplicated life. She'd thought chasing Lucy and finding her birthmother would tell her more about who she was, make her whole. All it had done was reveal that everything she thought she could count on was a lie.

Everything except the man beside her, who was staring a little too deliberately out the windshield. Had she messed things up so thoroughly that he was already convinced of her rejection? Probably. She reached out one of her hands to cover his on the steering wheel, eliciting one labored breath. She went no further, not wanting to tease or distract him. She just wanted him to know that she was there.

"Thank you," she said simply, for once all her volumes of words failing her.

He turned to look at her then. "You're not going to fight me on this?"

"I think we've wasted enough time fighting with each other. Besides, I think we both could use someone looking out for us for a change."

She was used to his serious expressions, but he was extraordinarily handsome when he smiled, and she resolved to give him plenty of reasons to do so more often.

"Eyes on the road, mister," she finally said. "It'll be real embarrassing when we get pulled over for reckless driving."

Once they reached his house Nathan turned on the stove and started unpacking the groceries.

"So, what's for dinner?" she asked. "Or is it a big surprise?"

"Lobster," he answered. "Seem to recall you're fond of that."

"Oh, absolutely. Do you need any help?"

He shook his head. "I'd like my kitchen to still be standing by the end of the night."

"It's still impossible sometimes to tell that you're joking."

"Who says that I'm joking?" But he cracked as she scowled at him, pulling her forward to brush a kiss across her lips so brief it was over before she even realized what was happening. It was such a strange, familiar gesture, as if they'd been together for years and not less than two days. But already he was pushing her toward the door. "I'll take care of dinner. Go. Relax. Change into something comfortable. I'll find you when its ready."

It was as if he understood how new and strange this was for her, to spend every waking moment with someone, even him, and he was giving her space to chill and process.

It wasn't until she'd shut herself in his bedroom and opened the duffle bag of clothes she'd brought from the Gull that date etiquette started to overwhelm her. He'd told her to change into something comfortable, but had that been code for switching her work attire with something sexier? He was making her a lobster dinner, surely with romance on his mind, and if he was anyone else she'd feel the need to impress him. But she honestly thought Nathan had no expectations that she'd emerge in anything but some comfy sweats – and she also knew she didn't have to wear anything alluring to turn him on. If she did pick out something nice for him, would he think she was trying too hard or would he appreciate the effort?

Still uncertain, she pulled her cell phone out the pocket of her slacks.

As she glanced at the screen the missed voicemail icon she'd been dutifully ignoring since she left the Barn caught her eye. As long as she wasn't looking at the shadows under Nathan's eyes it was pretty easy to forget how long she'd been gone, but something about the idea of listening to the messages someone had left her during that time filled her with dread. She wasn't sure why her phone was even still functioning when she hadn't paid a bill in two years. But such logic didn't seem to matter much in Haven. Truth was her social security number and bank account belonged to a brunette amnesiac in Boston, and yet their paper trails had never crossed.

It wasn't like there were many people lining up to call her even when she was in town, she tried to convince herself. Rarely did she let fear smoother her curiosity. She was being ridiculous, and with nothing to do until dinner was ready she was out of excuses to put this off. With a deep breath she activated her voicemail and entered her password.

"You have thirty-three new voice messages," the perpetually cheerful automated voice told her. Audrey was nearly certain she'd misheard. She didn't think she'd gotten that many messages in her entire life. Especially if her life started the day she came to Haven.

She wasn't expecting the first voice she heard to be Nathan's, hoarse and frantic with a rasp that could have been blood rattling in his lungs.

"Parker, get out of there now! Howard's dead and the Barn's breaking up. Duke's coming. You have to go with him. Don't be noble – something's wrong. Come back."

His desperation stole her breath. Suddenly she was back on Kick 'Em Jenny Neck, watching the betrayal flash across his face as she'd given Duke her gun. She'd hated that their goodbye was steeped in agony. She'd rather the last thing she remembered be the way his eyes had fluttered shut when she kissed him.

Her finger trembled as she saved the message.

By the time the next one started she had a terrible sense that she knew how all of them would go.

"I'm at the hospital. Dunno if Duke told you, but Jordan shot me. But I'm okay. They patched me up. Gave me some meds. Waste of time, though. I don't feel anything. The Troubles aren't gone. The meteors didn't stop. Nothing's fixed. Whatever the Barn was supposed to do didn't work. So there's no reason for you to stay away. You need to come back. Because the town needs you. Because I need you. Please, Audrey."

A tear coursed down her cheek. Nathan Wuornos wasn't a begging man. But his voice, drugged and feeble, pleaded with her. And she hadn't obliged.

"I'm going to find you, Parker. Whatever it takes. However long it takes."

There was the man she knew, determined and stubborn and fearless. But he didn't stay that way. The shades of desperation in each subsequent message shifted between grief and anger, frustration and despair, but it was always something consuming him. Driving him to confess what he probably wouldn't say to her face, with far more words that he normally uttered at once.

Just like watching an accident on the highway, she couldn't tear herself away.

"It's been a week. Damn it Parker, I don't know what to do. Troubles are popping up all over the place and you're the one who always talked everyone down. I can't convince anyone everything is going to be okay when I don't believe it."

He recounted events she'd read about in the police reports. The rise of the Guard and its threat of a purge of all non-Troubled. He'd been frantic when he introduced the possibility, exhausted when he declared the crisis averted. The exhaustion seemed to linger. No matter what other emotions his words conveyed, he always sounded bone-weary.

"Today a Guardsman held a gun to my head and I almost told him to pull the trigger. I wanted him to. But I could hear your voice, telling me to man up. I knew that you'd be ashamed of me. You wanted me to live. That's why you wouldn't let me follow you into the Barn. You wanted me to have a life and look after the town and be there when you returned so next time someone would just be straight with you. I want to be that man you thought I was. But I'm not. My father was right. I'm weak. Always have been."

Tears ran down her face as she choked back a sob. She felt paralyzed in a nightmare she couldn't wake up from. What if he hadn't thought of her in that moment? What if she'd come back and he'd been in the ground with no chance, however faint, of resurrection?

"I'm not sure if you can hear me. Sometimes I hope you can't. Because I can't bear the thought of you stuck someplace, listening to this, feeling sorry for me, wondering what's going to happen. But I want to believe that the Troubles haven't stopped because you're out there somewhere, still you. That Duke found you so you aren't alone and the two of you are looking for a way back. With James. That one day you'll come back to town and nothing that's happened in the past year will matter, because you'll fix it. You'll fix me. And if there's anyone in this whole damn word stubborn enough to break fate and come back it's you."

In a few of the messages she could hear the alcohol on his breath. She thought of the Chief with his list of vices, explaining with his dying breath all the ways he'd tried to hold together, and she couldn't blame him for trying to find some solace.

"I went to Colorado. Thought maybe there'd be some clue about all this. But June Cogan's mind is gone and no one would tell me why there are Guard symbols plastered all over her house. And the whole time all I could think was it should have been me by your side when you discovered that James was our son. And that I should have told you about Sarah. I made so many mistakes. I was afraid you wouldn't forgive me for that one. I tried to resist. But she was just so … you. She looked at me the way you did when I told you I'd found Lucy Ripley. And all I'd seen in your eyes when you'd looked at me for so long was disgust. I just wanted to remember the way we used to be … how we could have been. She looked so disappointed when I turned away, and for once I knew how to fix that. And as soon as you touched me I was lost. It's not an excuse but – I'm not sorry. Because even if he's gone now James was proof that the two of us lived, and loved, and rang some small scrap of happiness out of this godforsaken place."

To hear that he'd thought she'd been disgusted with him was like a knife to her gut. She'd been exhausted and frustrated, terrified out of her mind he'd get caught up in the crossfire of whatever supernatural soap opera her life had become, but the only one she'd been disgusted with was herself. She'd hated herself for not being able to stand the fact he could be happy with Jordan, couldn't abide that he was keeping his distance even though she'd done everything in her power to make that happen. Her list of mistakes was just as long as his, and she'd started penning hers first. She'd hated the situation, but she'd never hated him. She wished that it had been her on that beach, not Sarah, because she wanted to go back in time and absolve him. He shouldn't have had to find another version of her just to see her smile again.

"You know what I'm really scared of, Parker? It's not waiting for you. Twenty-seven years is a long time, but I'll do it. I'll wait through every damn day just to do this all over again, just like you said. Even if I'm old and you don't remember any of this – it'll be okay. But what terrifies me is maybe you aren't coming back. What if you're dead? What if you've been dead since the moment that Barn broke up? Sometimes I can't breathe because I'm so sure that I've killed you. That by shooting Howard I destroyed the Barn with you in it. And James. And then I sent Duke to his death. The only three people I care about dead because I was too damned selfish to let you go. And what if you knew, in those last moments, that all this was my fault. You wanted to sacrifice yourself for Haven and instead of saving you I made your death meaningless. Except maybe I didn't. I don't know. And twenty-seven years of not knowing…how am I supposed to bear it?"

She had to pause before she listened to the next message, her heart pounding so fast she felt flushed and faint. How many had it been? How much longer could she do this to herself? Surely he'd never meant for her to hear all this. It was like talking to a gravestone, with the perk of her voice on the answering machine. He'd just been trying to cope and she was back now and it didn't matter, because he hadn't killed her. He'd saved her, and maybe he had damned the town to do it but she was glad she hadn't waited another twenty-five years to return.

But he had spent two years in hell and she had fast forwarded through it all and if he could pull himself through it somehow then she could listen to the evidence.

She went on to the next message.

"It's starting to hurt less, you being gone. I should be glad about that, but I'm not. Because I know what it means. It's not that I've accepted this is the way it should be. I'll never believe that. I'm just starting to forget what pain feels like. When my Trouble came back I was scared and angry. But by the time you came to Haven that had faded. I was just numb, inside and out. You made me feel things inside again long before you touched me. But I'm losing all of that. And the day I forget how much it hurts that you're gone will be like you've died all over again."

She couldn't fathom anything being worse than pain, but she understood something about emptiness. All her life the mystery of her parents had been a void she couldn't fill, not with boys or school or a successful career. Maybe that hadn't been Audrey at all. Maybe that had been who she really was, some mythical child of Haven, lost or damned or something, either searching for the truth of her existence or living out her penitence.

Was that why they trusted each other? Because at the end of the day, they both just wanted to feel alive?

"I never told you I loved you. At first I thought it would mess things up between us. Then you got kidnapped and started pushing me away and I figured you wouldn't even care. But I should have told you anyway. I should have made sure you knew instead of assuming you had to. Because what the hell were we doing? I didn't care about Jordan, and I don't think you really wanted Duke. We knew you'd have to leave. So why didn't we make the most of every minute we had left instead of barely speaking to each other? I should have kissed you. I should have showed you how I felt since I couldn't find the words. I shouldn't have let you run before you were even gone. We could have made those last few months something beautiful, instead of something ugly. We wasted our chance, and I just want it back."

The operator's voice returned, telling her the mailbox was full and she should delete unwanted messages. She wanted to delete them all, not just from her phone, but from her brain, and also Nathan's life. She wanted to go back to three days ago, after the reunion, and when Nathan said he was going to look at satellites with Duke she wanted to demand that he stay. To give him one beautiful memory to hold on to that was completely her. To spend the early hours of the dawn reminding him what kind of man she knew he was, so he wouldn't question it once she was gone. To explain how she could never be disgusted with him. To tell him that she loved him, and sometimes it felt like she always had.

"Dinner's almost ready," Nathan called as he entered, but he stopped in his tracks when he saw her clutching her phone, her face a splotchy mess.

"I was hoping you wouldn't get those." His hand rubbed the back of his neck in vain. He looked contrite and embarrassed, like a boy caught doing something wrong. But that notion was absurd. Loving her was his biggest sin, and she couldn't fault him for that.

"Nathan." All she could manage was a shaky exhale. She hated herself for the weakness. He deserved someone who could be strong for him. But listening to a two year litany of his pain had brought her to her knees, metaphorically, and she felt as sick and useless as she had after Duke had told her about the Hunter.

Her distress seemed to compound his own. "Don't cry, Parker."

Something in his plaintive tone launched her forward. She crossed the room in a few quick steps and threw her arms around him, burying her face in his solid chest and breathing him in. She could smell seafood from the kitchen, but underneath that was the familiar scent that was uniquely him. He wasn't some tortured voice on a phone she couldn't reach – he was here.

"You're not alone anymore," she mumbled. He had tensed when she had grabbed him, but he was beginning to settle, his heartbeat slowing, the anxiety at her state flowing out of him as he got used to the prolonged contact. His arms came around her, warm and comforting.

"I know." It sounded like he did, but tones could be deceiving. She didn't know how he could let go of so much so quickly. Three days ago she'd been gone, and he'd been a maelstrom of misery.

"I won't leave you alone again." Her hands worked at the back of his shirt, desperate to find their way under, skin on skin contact is better, to seal her promise with a reassurance only she could give him.

And when she finally spread her hand across his lower back he arched into her, inhaling sharply. There had been so much touching since she returned, yet she could still send him reeling.

"Dinner," he protested with a cracked voice, but she was far more concerned with not wasting this chance.

"Dinner can wait," she declared as she pulled his shirt over his head.

Later they tossed the lobster and she watched him from one of his kitchen stools as he made pancakes. There was a surety to his movements as he measured and mixed ingredients that she found fascinating. He couldn't feel the spatula he was holding, but he used it deftly. Occasionally he broke focus to glance back at her. She was wearing his shirt and little else, and when she caught him looking at her legs rather than her face she recrossed them deliberately, giggling at the flush that crept up his neck. But he didn't look away, taunting her right back by trying to make her forget it was her rumbling stomach that had driven them from the bedroom.

She'd banished their anguish with the feel of his skin against hers, warm and soft and forgiving. They'd burned through all their emotions and pushed them off the cliff with them until she was empty and calm. He'd made her delete the messages, voice rough as he swore he believed she was back and had forgiven him. She hadn't been able to find the words for those apologies, so she'd imprinted them on his skin, imagining them sinking deep inside of him, taking root in his brain and his heart, waking every part of him so he'd never feel less than whole again.

"It's my mother's recipe," he said as he placed a steaming plate before her, looking proud and anxious as if after everything he still needed this to win her approval. The weight of the revelation made them even sweeter. She could picture him, a shadow at his mother's side, watching carefully to learn the secret art. The image did something funny to her insides, twisting them up in a way that wasn't unpleasant.

Of course the pancakes were delicious. But she would have sworn they were no matter what they tasted like, and meant every word.

It was a long overdue moment, unsullied by the past or future. Troubles be damned; they'd been heading toward this ever since she'd noticed that her partner was handsome and kind and had a fixation on pancakes. And even if it had taken them far too long to get here, the wait had been worth it.

As Nathan took a seat beside her and clunked his glass of orange juice against hers, for the first time in any life she could remember Audrey felt like she was home.

Please tell me what you think. And Happy Easter!