Title: When We Still Had Time
Fandom: Haven
Characters/Relationships: Audrey/Duke/Nathan ish
Rating: PG-13
Length: 2,200 words
Content notes: Peril, some blood.
Spoilers: Post S2, probably set midway through S3.
Summary: Nathan doesn't usually answer Duke's calls first time. Duke would have really liked him to make an exception today.



It’s always something of a toss-up whether or not Nathan will answer Duke’s call. Duke would really like things to come up heads today, because Audrey’s not answering either and this situation is becoming precarious.

Nathan doesn’t answer the first time, or the second, but third time is the charm and Nathan exhales as he answers. “Duke.”

“Hi. Any chance you’re near Allen’s Bluffs? Because I could do with an assist.”

“Yeah? What kind of assist is that?”

“The kind where you come rescue me and don’t ask too many questions?”

And Duke is maybe going to kiss Nathan when he gets here because that right there is the sound of the Bronco screeching around and accelerating. “What happened?” Nathan asks. Then: “Take this, Duke’s in trouble.”

Audrey’s voice goes echoing, putting him on speaker. “What happened? Are you hurt?”

“Well, I’m a little hurt that you’ve apparently been ignoring my calls.”

“I just got in the car, I’ve been out on the water, there was... What’s wrong?”

Duke almost shrugs before he remembers that a) they can’t see him and b) that’s likely to end up with him dead. “I’m kind of... above the water right now. Mostly. I’d rather not be in it. So come get me. Please.”

Nathan talks through gritted teeth to Duke at the best of times, and now he’s really putting the effort in. “What happened?”

“Would you believe sirens, luring me out to sea?”

“No,” Nathan answers flatly, followed by Audrey’s, “Maybe?”

“Okay,” Duke admits, “not sirens. Ice people. Ice-causing people. Truck took a little dive. Yet another Haven-related vehicular calamity that I very much doubt anyone is going to reimburse me for.”

“Insurance doesn’t cover acts of Haven?” Audrey asks.

“Or he’s not insured,” Nathan offers, which is both rude and not entirely inaccurate. Also, not really the point right now. Duke’s hands are starting to go numb.

“Duke?” Audrey asks.

“Yeah?”

“Keep talking.”

“I’m putting an awful lot of energy right now into not letting go of a cliff-face. I think maybe you ought to be the one taking the burden of conversation.”

Nathan instructs, “Talk anyway.”

“Sure, okay. Demanding,” Duke says. “So how was your day? Meet any ice people?”

“Yes, actually,” Audrey says. “There’s a boat frozen a mile out from the harbour, ice all the way down.”

“Okay,” Duke agrees. “Sucks to be in that boat. But my day’s still worse.”

“Was she aiming at you?” Nathan asks.

“He, and no. At least, I don’t think so. No! I hadn’t done anything at that point.”

“What have you done now?” Nathan asks.

“Still mostly nothing,” Duke says. “Unless you count the dangling, which I don’t.” It’s essentially just waiting with added pressure. He did try climbing up a few times before he gave up. The cliffs are too steep and he figured out that he was getting nowhere. He eventually decided to risk hanging off with one hand and using the other to grab his cell phone.

“Are they still there?” Audrey asks.

“After their attempt at a getaway left me here and my truck on the wrong side of the cliff? No, funny enough they didn’t stick around.”

“Duke.”

“So help me, you tell me to keep talking right now...”

“We’re nearly there,” Nathan says, tone gone flatter than flat, brooking no argument. That’s almost reassuring right now.

“Okay. Good.” His hands are cold, chapped up from their excursion trying to gain a hold on a rock-face rapidly turning arctic, and an attempt to change his grip proves problematic. “Fuck.”

“Duke?”

“If I stop talking, it’s just because I’ve dropped the phone, okay?” It’s trapped between his head and his shoulder, and he’s not going to try and catch it if he loses contact. “Remind me to get one of those headsets.”

Audrey laughs, and it doesn’t sound quite right, but Duke latches onto it anyway. She says, “I’m not sure that would go with your look.”

“What look? My look is great, I’ll have you know.”

Nathan adds, “You’re definitely the only person I know who would even attempt it.”

“That wasn’t even half of a compliment, and I know that,” Duke tells him. “But coming from you, I’m going to take it as one.” This, naturally, is the point where he drops the phone, and those will be terrible last words if Duke is the next to fall.

He’s too high up to hear the phone splash (or crack apart on the rocks, depending where exactly it fell) – all he can hear is the crash of waves against the rocks, and the occasional bird. Maybe he shouldn’t be worrying. This isn’t the death he was promised, his brain knows that, and if he could just convince the rest of him to stop freaking out, this day wouldn’t be so bad. Unless, he supposes, the last thing he’s going to see is Nathan grabbing for him, not quite in time. That would be pretty grim.

There’s the roar of an engine, and then the two voices he likes best in the world, no matter what they sometimes think of him. “Duke?”

He shouts back and, after a moment, Audrey is looking down at him. Nathan appears a second later. Nathan says, “I feel like we’ve been here before.”

“Rope,” Audrey instructs. “No screwing around this time.”

“I didn’t screw around the first time,” he tells her. “I got you out, didn’t I?”

“Rope.”

Nathan is already holding the end of the rope. “On the truck.” He looks over the edge and frowns. “How the hell did you manage to get yourself over there?”

Duke glares as best as he can manage. “Ice. Person. Not my fault.”

Nathan ignores him. “I’m gonna have to go down on the rope to get it over to him.”

Audrey says. “Or I’ll go down, and you can stay up here.”

“If I get scraped up on the way down there, I won’t feel it.”

“Yeah? And when you get down there, and I have to haul both of you back up again? Stay up here and feed the rope.”

“Audrey.”

Nathan should really know better than to pick a fight with Audrey when she’s using that voice. She says, “Nathan. Stop arguing.”

They both disappear from view and Duke briefly entertains the notion that they’ve forgotten about him. Audrey comes back, rope looped around her waist. She looks down at him. “I’ll be right there.” She’s turned on her ‘reassuring’ voice, which she normally only pulls out on Troubled people about to destroy the whole town. Duke figures he must look less than calm right now.

Nathan is giving him an equally strange look. He says to Audrey, “Hang on.”

“Puns, really?” she asks.

“Wait,” he grumbles.

Duke can hear Audrey protesting something – loudly – but he can’t see what the problem is.

Then she asks, “Why are you bleeding on my arm?”

Nathan says reasonably, “Because if I bleed on your hand, your fingers’ll slip on the rope.”

She’s too far away for him to tell for sure, but Duke bets that Audrey is rolling her eyes. She says, “You’re a whole lot less cute than you think you are.”

“I’m very cute,” Nathan counters, while helping her down over the edge. He steers her left, past the outcropping of rock that Duke is hanging mostly underneath. “Little further,” he says, “and then right again.” Her feet kick down a little shower of rocks that bounce off Duke’s shoulders and he tries not to yell out. She’s still talking to him, a gentle patter of encouragement that he keeps hold of even though his hands and arms are screaming at him.

Audrey’s arms come around Duke. “Got you,” she says, grinning bright.

“Great. Can I let go yet?”

Audrey says, “Pretty sure this is for you.” She nods at the red stain Nathan has indeed left on her pale skin. And yes, Duke hadn’t been able to think of a rational explanation that wasn’t this, but on the other hand he’s hard pushed to call this rational either. Nathan has made his feelings pretty clear, and even by Haven standards this is something Duke would not have predicted.

Duke wraps his hand around the bloody palm-print on her forearm. It doesn’t feel different because it’s Nathan. That’s not how his thing works – it’s all the same to him. Duke has thought about it, and the only reason he can think of for Troubled blood having any effect on him at all is to give him an edge when he has to stab someone. (He never claimed they were cheerful thoughts.) So, of course he’s lying to himself. Of course it’s different that it’s Nathan. Nathan, somewhere along the line, has figured out that Duke isn’t going to use this against him.

Strength runs through him. He’s not going to fall any more. Audrey is smiling at him; Audrey has never been afraid of this.

Duke steadies himself with one arm around Audrey, and they climb back up together, Nathan pulling from the other side. They reach the top just about when the rush of blood is fading, in time for Nathan to give him one good stare before dragging them both up. The three of them end up a foot away from the edge, tangled up in the rope and each other’s arms and legs. Audrey breathes against Duke’s neck. “You’re cold.”

“Yeah,” he agrees, because that’s been true for at least an hour now.

Nathan gets up. “Come on.” He offers one hand to Duke and the other to Audrey, pulling them to their feet. They let themselves be steered into the back seat of the truck, where Nathan climbs in after them. Nathan hunts around in the back and eventually throws a blanket at Duke. “Here.”

“Thanks.”

Nathan shrugs.

“No, thanks for- yeah.”

“It’s fine.”

Audrey sighs and elbows Duke before, apparently just for good measure, reaching over to jab Nathan in the shoulder.

“Ow,” Duke protests. “What was that for?”

“You know what that was for,” she tells him. And yeah, he kind of does.

Nathan undoubtedly knows as well, but that doesn’t mean either of them is going to say any more. Nathan reaches into the front of the truck and grabs the radio. “Laverne, Duke’s fine, we’ll all be back soon.” He sits back down beside them, Duke stuck in the middle under the blanket. Nathan lays his arm along the back of the seat. He holds out his phone. “What did the first two messages say?”

Duke shrugs. “First one said call me back. Second one said call me back please. If you hadn’t answered the third time...”

“I should have answered first time.”

“You were with Audrey,” Duke says, because he’s mostly sure that was the reason and he doesn’t want to know if it wasn’t.

Nathan nods, but takes Duke’s hands in his own and starts rubbing them aggressively.

“Ow,” Duke says. Nathan looks at him quickly and Duke corrects himself. “It’s fine.” His hands are roughed up but they’re not cold any more. Nathan keeps going, a little gentler this time.

Audrey tugs Duke’s shoulder down. “Stop getting into trouble.” He’s about to explain to her all of the ways he got into less trouble before he met her, when she kisses his cheek.

So instead he just rolls his eyes and lets her pull the blanket tighter around them all. He says, “I try.”

Nathan coughs. “Maybe you should just stick with us.” Duke looks at him. “Safer that way.” Nathan breaks eye contact. “We should get back.”

Audrey says, “The road’s pretty iced-up. Maybe we should wait and call for back-up.”

Nathan actually laughs. “Parker.”

She gives him her best innocent smile. “What?”

“This is what you want to be doing right now?” he asks.

“What else would I want to do?” She pulls her feet underneath her. “This is the first break I’ve had in days.”

It says a lot about the kind of year they’ve been having that a reply like that makes any kind of sense.

Nathan leans forward again and Duke assumes that he hasn’t been swayed by Audrey’s reasoning, but all he does is push a button on the stereo. Music starts playing, almost too quiet to hear. Nathan sits back down. “Okay. Short break from reality it is.” He slings his arm over Duke’s shoulder, hand resting on Audrey’s arm.

This being Haven, there is probably another version of this day where the world came down tails, Nathan didn’t answer the phone call and Duke ran out of time waiting for them. He maybe left a message for Audrey and one for Nathan, and in this version, Duke doesn’t know what he was going to say. He doesn’t know whether anything he would have said would have meant anything different than the three of them here, just like this. Audrey hums along to the radio, leaning on Duke’s arm. Nathan smiles at her and, when he catches Duke doing the same thing, smiles at Duke too. That’s more complicated, the meaning more tangled, than anything Duke would have said as a goodbye. But today they can mean whatever they like. Today is the day where they don’t say goodbye yet.