Haven: Collapse: 7: Restoration of Real

[amichan]

 

I feel sick.

Chill. Cold.

To the Bone.

She's gone. My father—it's so vivid. Her body—broken, violated, bloody. Nate there with me, argument and accusation gone in the visual of that moment hitting us both. The lights, the sirens. Nate sticking up for me for what might have been the last time.

Coming back to the stinking house empty and drinking down Simon's special vodka because no fucks and then him so full of rage at that, but then just laughing, because you're what? Upset about that? “I did you a favor. You've already tapped it. Why do you need to keep it?...What do you mean you didn't? Wow. So I...”

White. Hot.

And the fight, and the beating, because too much vodka; but then...

...he didn't expect the sledgehammer while he was sprawled out in the easy chair full of victory second best vodka, “That's how you repay me?”

Rage. Hot.

Years...this shouldn't...she's gone. She can't be. She should be here. This has to be a dream. I have to be making...I have to get out of this. There weren't needles, smokes, smack or selling myself. There weren't...I left. I got out of Haven. This is wrong. My brain is on fire with the wrongness. Simon died. He didn't take me Troubled hunting. I can make out bits and pieces of a room, of white, of jarring in my hand. I can see a needle and a fire.

Smell stale old smoke of a burned out bakery that isn't burned out. Here chatter and banter, angry phone calls, and bleeding arms, and the breathless sparks of cinnamon sugar silver high, that's not a sensation I've had...but it feels so strong and clear, and righteous because she's gone and this bastard—this bastard is as much the problem as the one who met the sledgehammer.  

$$$$

“Duke! Duke!” Julia's voice, her hands on my face and in my hair, drawing me back from the shadow of an upturned garden shed and into this room of beeping machines and drawn shades. There are a couple of other people.

“Julia--” I can hardly feel my own voice, “You're okay...you're alive,” I have to touch her, to make sure. This—this might be a trick. I know it can't have been real but at the same time it feels so, fucking detox nightmare.

“You're—you're shaking,” she murmurs, pushing through a nurse and an orderly who had moved her aside to do some sort of check, “that's not—that's fear...what happened?”

“It's so st—but it felt—you—you were dead.”

“I was what?” Her anger. Red. Hot, “Can we get another tox screen on him, please?” she points at the nearest hospital person, “Now.”

There's a moment of must get needle away from me. No more needles.

Julia close at my side moves in closer, cradling my head, stroking my hair, “Whatever you experienced I'm here now. You're safe. I'm going to call Audrey though, because...it has to happen. It will happen. Do you want it to happen in here where you can listen or I can take it out in the corridor, it's just there may be yelling, so...”

Blood is drawn. There is no cinnamon.

“We'll clear out,” the orderly says, even though he doesn't have the blood.

“Good,” Julia says, “Thank you. You want in on the call or not, Boss?”

Hearing Boss makes me want to cry. I'm also feeling so, so very sore and disjointed, and dry. I have to know what's going on. I know Julia will tell me but this whole mess in my head, “I have to be in on the call.”

Julia lowers the guard rail and I shift over as best I can, stiff and uncomfortable. My body doesn't feel quite right. She curls up next to me and rests her head on my chest. I find I'm examining my arms but they're as clear as they've been for years—not the stream of scabby, purple mess I was afraid of. She presses Audrey's face and I hear it dialing and the click of connection.

“What the hell, Audrey?” Julia demands.

“Wha--?” Audrey replies, “What do you mea--” but Julia cuts her off.

“You know. You're the only one who would.” I find myself, as well, as running my hand through Julia's hair the way she often does mine, lifting it towards my face here and there and breathing in the scent of it, assuring myself she's there. I can remember the things we've done. The camping trip with Nathan and Audrey, the songs, the sex, all the sex, the quickies, and not-so-quickies, the pledges and promises, the tattoos, cradling her against me in the car in some car park in Portland because to her I'd been gone six months thanks to that stupid fucking not-Barn. All those nights drinking because I thought that nothing like this could ever be, but at the same time, there's her broken body, and that guy's skull beneath my hands scrunching like papier-mâché toy.

“I don--”

“You were going to tell us, right?”

“Let me finish a sentence, would you?” Audrey rushes out, “What do you think I know about that I need to be explaining?”

“How Duke managed to contain another Trouble from his fucking hospital bed?” The guy whose skull—he was I remember the cinnamon sugar bread blood, and the rush that gave way to the strength to do that, “Potentially while I was right there WITH HIM?”

“That wasn't a detox nightmare?” I ask. My voice must sound horrible because the sound of scrabbling and jingling of keys comes through Audrey's side of the phone conversation and I can feel the shakiness. I lost her. I lost her. My own father killed her. He did those things to her and there's the minor level of knowing it wasn't me who found her but I feel it anyway. The ache of losing her.

“Shit. Shit. Shit. Shit,” she says, uncharacteristically full of swearing, “I'll be right there.”

“Good,” Julia snaps the phone shut and tosses it at her purse. She wraps her arms around me tightly, and I cling to her to make sure she doesn't disappear that this reality stays with me and doesn't roll back into the heroin-drenched nightmare of the Ursa, sledgehammers and skull-crushing void, “It's okay,” she whispers, “You're safe. I'm here. I'm here if you want to get it out, if you want to talk about it. You don't have to talk about it, but if you need to or want to I'm here. I'm not going anywhere. You're safe.”

The dam breaks. I cry someone else's tears long buried under more than a decade of pain at her death, and the relief of both of us that she's not been brutalized and killed, “He killed you,” slips out at some point, “You were dead. He killed you. It was—it was...” I stop myself from saying anything more about it, and she holds me and repeating over and over that I'm safe, and she's there and she's not going anywhere, and that she loves me and she'll always be here, echoes of words I said in Portland, and she tilts my face to hers and kisses me over and over too, until I can stem the tide enough and find some way to actual sentences.

It's then I notice Audrey is sitting in the chair next to the one that Julia's purse is on. She's turning her cell phone round and round in her hands.

“Tell me it wasn't your idea,” Julia demands of Audrey.

Audrey shakes her head, “No. It was hi—other Duke's,” she amends, looking at me, “I told him to call for back-up if he found Pearson.”

“And you honestly thought he would?” she kisses me on the forehead and then presses her forehead against mine while stroking my hair with both her hands. It's so reassuring

“I...” Audrey seems really off-balance. She's still moving her phone around from one hand to the other.

Julia shifts her position slightly so she's nestled in the crook of my arm, “Did you know I was dead?” she asks Audrey.

Audrey looks slightly embarrassed, or is it uncomfortable, “I found out after I got hit in the face but before we worked out it was probably this Andrew Pearson's Trouble that screwed up in the time line.”

Julia reaches a hand up to cup my face and kisses my nose, “When did I die in the other time line?”

“That Nathan said...sixteen years?” Audrey says.

But I know exactly. It's burned in there, “9^th September 1994,” reciting it sends a chill down my throat and throughout my chest, and my voice can barely form the words, “It was Simon.”

Julia freezes, and I take her hands and squeeze them tightly, “Oh God, Duke!” she says, and then she leans slightly closer and says more softly, “Did you make him pay?”

I nod, carefully.

“How are you remembering this?” Audrey asks, her voice is shaky.

“Good,” Julia says, softly to me, “How do you think I knew he'd taken in another Trouble?”

“The...” Audrey waves her hand around herself. The other hand is still messing nervously with her phone, “Light...scape?”

“Which I checked after he woke up out of a screaming nightmare because honestly having that thing up all the time is like having Windows 95 screen saver going constantly all over the place.”

I can see the pipes running in my head as I'm listening to someone talk. They keep pulling my attention, spiraling around each other, bright colors, breaking through lights, rolling off the screen, and out of the window into the night. Fish swim through it avoiding the net webbing and colliding with a glass screen of someone's helmet. They freak out, arms flailing and bash into the person next to them a conga line of panic. I realize Audrey and Julia have stopped to look at me because I let out a snort-laugh that has no proper place. Julia leans down as she pulls my hand up towards her mouth to kiss it before she turns back to Audrey.

“So, I'm guessing you asked where I was and he punched you.”

Now, she looks embarrassed. I wonder if she's actually going to say what she said to me-him, “Yeah...” it trails, maybe she's trying to decide too, “um...sort of. Open honesty. I said you wouldn't want to see him like that. I was freaking out...”

Yeah, that sixteen year long stomach flu...how was he not dead? I can see the snippets of him, at least twenty pounds lighter, track marks, collapsed veins, but...no infection.

Julia lets out a sigh, releasing some tension, “So, then you learned that I'd been dead for longer than I'd been alive, and he was still hurting badly enough to hit you for mentioning me, and you didn't think he was going to find the person responsible for the time line thing and...” she pauses for a moment, “take him out himself?”

Audrey puts her head in her hands, resting her elbows on her lap and rubs her hands down the back of her head.

Julia pulls her hands free of mine and runs her fingers up one of my arms gently, “You're okay. You're clean. I don't blame the other you. You did what you had to do in order to keep going, right?”

“Apparently that was all the heroin,” I tell her after a long sigh, and then I shake my head, “seems like Crockers just don't die unless they're murdered though.”

“Good, because I want you around for a very long time. Besides, the other you had to stick around long enough to get revenge and fix things, right?”

“So it seems.”

She drops her voice again, “Was it clean, or did you make it hurt?”

I lean my head over to her ear, “It hurt him, for a little while,” I realize my voice is shaky, “He screamed pretty loudly so it attracted attention.”

She moves so that she can kiss me gently on the lips, “If I could have done it, I would have made him hurt a lot for what he put you through.”

“Tiny vengeful girlfriend,” I murmur.

“He hurt you. Even if it was the other you, you still remember it. He's lucky he's dead,” she wets her lips, “Do you regret killing him?”

That's the strange part. I remember how I felt when I had to kill Nix, when the gravedigger threw himself on the knife and most recently with Madeline, but this...it's just mostly—it's just the way he went about things, “I—I mostly feel a little creeped out by it—by the way it felt but not that it happened.”

She kisses me again, “My vengeful gypsy.”

“And he'd ruined many peoples lives. He did it because he wanted Dad and the Rev together...murdering Troubled and me to learn how to do it right.” Simon was a Legend. I shudder. Most of the life itself is snippets only, but the last few hours they're pretty clear right up until the point his skull broke apart in my hands.

“So, if you'd found him first,” Julia asks Audrey, “What would you have done?”

Audrey looks pale, “Well, I was going to say that we'd have wanted to know his reasons and we didn't get to because...but that...” she's stuttering, and her hands know what to do with themselves even less, “...that rolls back to what happened with the Rev.”

“In this time line or that one?” Julia asks, drily.

“In this one,” she gives an almost soundless laugh, “In that one apparently Simon somehow freaked the Rev out so much he switched sides,” she shakes her head. She's probably wondering like I do what the final straw on that was. Other Duke had no real idea exactly when the Rev switched, was it before Julia's murder I have to wonder because Simon didn't live too much longer after that.

“The question still stands,” Julia points out, “What would you have done with him, Audrey, if Duke hadn't found him first?”

“I know,” she says, looking down at her fingers, “Questions: finding out about the Trouble and it's specifics, why he did it. If he'd actually told us the truth on that though he'd have to go, like the Rev, because there's no way he could be trusted to just not put everything right back that way again if we could even get him to reverse it.”

“Did you find his body? I mean, in this time line. I assume there was one.”

“That's what I was setting up when you called. Body hunt.”

Julia's face quirks into a smile, “How did you explain that one?”

“It's...more like missing person, possible body, anonymous threat, Haven thing.”

“Duke,” Julia kisses my hand again, “do you mind if I spread word through the Guard as to what happened?”

I shake my head. My brain is running down a path of physical evidence on the body pointing to me being the killer and what might happen. Though I have been clearly in hospital this whole time with multiple witnesses and this was very, very justifiable.

“Let it be known that it's a very bad idea to try and rewrite the past,” Julia says her grin turning quite malicious, and quite sexy.

“I'm sure The Guard will be very pissed to hear the re-write took out their favorite tiny cowgirl,” I nuzzle her ear with my nose.

She caresses the tattoo on my wrist lightly with one finger, “The more important lesson—especially for the troublemakers—is that you killed to defend me.”

I touch my forehead against hers.

“My gypsy-on-a-leash,” she whispers, eyes twinkling.

Damn this catheter. Even so I have to give a slight smile, “not while we're stuck here...”

“I didn't even bring—” Julia has started to say.

Audrey awkwardly clears her throat, “I...think I should be going. I...questions...answered?”

“I take it if there's anything else about this Trouble incident I should know about, you'll tell me later?” she says to Audrey.

Audrey nods, wishes me well, says goodbye and scoots out the door.

“As I was saying,” Julia says, with a sly smile, “I didn't even bring the harness. Once I get you home, though...” she gives me a gentle kiss, “Feeling better though, Boss?”

Home. That feels like years away, “Somewhat...feels like we're gonna be stuck here forever now,” though if I'm feeling my actual self out, “Haziness and chills and fever though, they don't seem to have been...so...maybe that part...”

“We'll wait on the tox screen,” Julia says in tones of Magda saying no to snacks before dinner, “but,” she gropes at the air the way I know means she's checking the Lightscape, “it doesn't look like it's struggling. Do you feel like you're crashing?”

“I did when I first woke up, but I'm just sore now.”

“Is there anything I can do to help that won't make things worse in a different way?”

“I promised I'd stop complaining about not being able to go home,” I point out, “...and I know tox screen.”

She snuggles against me, “I know it sucks, but if you need more help than I can provide, I want you to be able to get it. Although,” she continues, tracing those circles on my chest, “I'm really looking forward to being able to cook for you again. Not to mention other things.”

“Ah, yeah. There are many things to look forward to, especially getting shot of this damned catheter,” I pout.

“Make a list,” her kiss teases all sorts of possibilities which make the catheter so much worse, “I wouldn't want to miss any of them.”

“Wicked wench,” I point out.

There's a knock on the door frame which interrupts me kissing her nose and an apologetic nurse.

“I hope you'll forgive my interruption because I have some positive news,” she says.

Julia practically flies off the bed and over to the nurse to look at the paperwork. I daren't breathe. Are we getting out of here? Please tell me we're getting out of here. When Julia finally looks over at me I'm sure I'm just staring at the both of them.

“There's still some in your system,” Julia says, “But it's within acceptable limits, so...”

“We can leave?”

“Yes. I'm going to get you checked out into my care.”

I flop back against the pillows throwing my arms up in the air, “Oh, thank God.”