TITLE: Lightning Rod
AUTHOR: roseveare
RATING: PG13
PAIRING: Jennifer Mason/Nathan Wuornos
LENGTH: 15,000 words
SUMMARY: "Consultant!" Jennifer darts her eyes at Nathan, nervously. Like Duke, right? "I'm a consultant?"
NOTES: I very much doubt the science in this is accurate, though I did research, but seemed to keep needing clarifications that none of the links I was looking at really gave, and ended up putting guesses together from hints.
NOTES #2: 'Something funny' had been requested and I was trying for something alike to the tone of a romantic comedy caper type movie. I had to break up the canon pairings and simultaneously didn't want to get too dark or down on that fact, which was an interesting little bit of a juggling act.
DISCLAIMER: Not mine, no profit, yadda, yadda, yadda.

Lightning Rod

When Jennifer finds Nathan Wuornos on the beach, she's still annoyed, her frustrations at everything bubbling as she wonders what she was ever doing here at all. She's not completely sure why she decided to seek him out, except that there are a limited number of people in Haven she knows. Except that he's the loser in this, the same as she is. More so - he's handing over his life and he's not even first choice.

She's really not thinking of paying comfort of any kind to this odd man. That isn't something that figures into her reasoning. Especially when she spies him curled up on the sand, arms around his knees, waves lapping a few feet from his hunched form. It annoys her, in fact. Why does he have to be such a martyr? It makes her want to sneak up behind him and kick him in the ass he's offering so neatly as a target.

She doesn't, because he hears her crunching footsteps and looks up. "Jennifer...?" He sounds surprised, but honestly, not very interested.

She frowns at the cigarette packet next to him, brand new and still in its plastic wrap. "I didn't know you smoked." He smelled like... well, like a lot of things, when they picked him up from that motel and bar, but a smoker wasn't one of them.

"It's not mine," he mumbles, and casts an odd glance back at some rocks before returning his gaze to the sea. The horizon is grey, already heavy with the forecast storm that everybody is talking about, but that isn't what he's looking at.

Nathan Wuornos is peculiar, but this is more than usually peculiar, and some of her annoyance dissipates. She doesn't want to sit on the wet sand, but she crouches beside him, feet tucked under her. "Some weird Haven tradition?"

He shakes his head, and explains, "My dad. Died here, about..." He frowns at his watch. "A year today. Day before yesterday. I've lost track of time."

"Oh." Jen feels guilty for thinking of him as a ball of angst when she thought this was just about losing Audrey. Well, she tells herself, in her defence everything else has been about him losing Audrey. "I'm really sorry."

Nathan shrugs and says, "I hated him smoking. Now I don't... have anything else I can think of to offer."

Jen offers philosophically, "I'm sure it's better to leave something he liked than something you approved of."

He gives a little snort through his nose, which is even kind of cute, and that's not something she thinks of Nathan as at all. Because, sure, he's got those chiselled cowboy good looks, and the dazzling blue eyes, but he's a big dope full of inner anger and suicidal crazy plans. Granted, most of the anger is inward-directed.

He's about as far from Duke, who she followed to Haven, as he could be. But Duke chose Lexie, and really, she doesn't know him, it's not like it was even a choice. She couldn't expect - so stupid to even hope it-

Anyway, she and Nathan may be the ones left out, but he's still determined to die and she's still stuck in a town that she came to on a mystery and a stranger's piratical smile.

Nathan surprises her after a moment by saying, "Thanks," and his body curls in a smooth movement as he rises to his feet. He's walking away before she's registered he's up. She scrambles up after him, but he's only gone to lay the cigarette packet atop that pile of rocks that so commanded his attention.

Jen hangs back as she hears him mutter, "Peace, dad," or something like that, and stays there, shoulders bent a moment, before he straightens and turns around - back to Jennifer, back to the route along the beach to his blue Bronco truck. His face looks clearer, though he still looks shrouded by doom. She reluctantly supposes having to die for a town that wants to kill you anyway and a woman who loves you, but not well enough to choose you, merits a spot of moping even without the depressing anniversary thrown in.

They don't know if it will even work when it's Duke that Lexie loves most.

Jennifer opens her mouth to say something about that, which she's self aware enough to know is at least in part a plea for him to fight for her, damn it, because she wants a clear run at Duke. Which is apparently, she realises, what she came here to tell him. She's saved from making herself such a hypocrite by a low rumble in the ground and then movement that she feels come up through her feet.

The mild tremor shakes Nathan harder. His reaction is extreme, his normal colour draining out of him to leave his complexion sort of greenish. Then he spins so hard back to the rocks and the offered cigarette pack that he should wrench his neck. Maybe he does, but can't tell. His feet stumble and he stutters, "D-dad?"

"Um, wow, what?" Jen squeaks. And she grabs Nathan's arm and drags on it, not quite believing what she's seeing. A... a spike is driving up out of the ground a short distance along the beach. "Nathan! Is your dead father doing this?" she yelps, as the thing grows, and keeps growing, taller than a man, and now maybe as high as a two storey house. She shifts on her feet and looks around nervously, but nothing else is happening. The rumbling and the movement subsides.

"...No," Nathan says, and she has to pause and remember what she just asked him, because a lot happened since then. She stares at the spike. "I don't think so, at least." There's relief in his voice and some of his normal colour is starting to return.

"I thought it was an earthquake," Jen says. "But that-"

Nathan's already looking intently at the giant spike. He moves, and she's supposed to be the tourist here, the one who doesn't know how dangerous this stuff is, but it's still her who warns, urgently, "Don't touch it!"

He pauses and frowns at his fingers. Right. Touching it won't tell him anything except whether or not it disintegrates people on contact, but that doesn't seem to stop him usually.

He draws his gun and cautiously extends his arm to tap the muzzle against the spike. It makes a dull bonk.

Jennifer breathes out and, since approaching the thing doesn't seem to be innately dangerous, cautiously steps closer. Close enough to see the spike, which seems to be made of a crystalline rock of some kind, formed of lots of little striated overlapping sheets that glisten. "What is it?"

Nathan taps it again with his gun, then puts his hand on it, quickly, then pulls away. Jen gasps, but nothing shocked him. He's just staring at his palms, and confirms a moment later, "Nothing. Can you touch it?"

"Why?" she demands in a gulp.

"See if it's hot, cold. If you can feel energy in it. Anything. Nothing happened," he adds, shaking his fingers and showing her his undamaged palm.

She grunts and sighs, and after a moment, pokes the rock quickly with her fingertip. She didn't get much from that, so emboldened, touches it with her whole palm, like he did. She shrugs at him and backs off, thinking distance is still a good idea. "Nothing. It feels like a rock. Do you know what it is?"

"I know it's a Trouble," he says. And Jen may well be the newcomer in town, but she had already guessed that.

Nathan supposes it shouldn't be surprising that he seems to have acquired Jennifer. After all, she doesn't know anybody else in Haven. Except Duke, and none of them were expecting the electric attraction between Duke and Audrey's new personality - who is still at least to some extent Audrey, which he discovered yesterday.

The plan hasn't changed, anyway. He was covering for them before, he'll cover for them now he knows he's doing it. It's unacceptable that Duke, who has done nothing wrong, should have to die for Haven because Nathan screwed up the cycle and shot Howard at the Barn.

Audrey remembers him, even if she's someone else enough to choose Duke. Therefore she must still have their love in her. It can still work, he tells himself. And it should be him.

He can't even blame Duke for not coming clean right away - first about the attraction between them (but Nathan's not blind, he could see that much) and then about Audrey's... Lexie's... intact memory. He can't blame Duke for not knowing what to do. He was blindsided by this, too.

Nathan should be with 'Lexie' to maintain the cover, for the Guard, but it's too sore right now for him to push it, and he feels fine having Jennifer to bounce ideas off right now, even if she's even less of a member of the police department than Lexie or Duke.

...And Lexie was Audrey, who's been screwing with him for the last week and is probably... screwing... Duke right now.

It hurts, but it's a dull hurt. Objectively, there are far worse things in the world than the fact Audrey can still be happy after he's dead and gone. Either way, he tears his thoughts away from that to focus on the new Trouble, which hasn't harmed anybody yet, but that's far from him believing it's not harmful. The day is young.

"Oh! This one's almost inside a house!" Jennifer is pinning photos up on the board in his office while Nathan focuses on the map. She's a reporter with keen skills for putting things together, and he's discovering she doesn't need to be told much. Definitely not told twice. He hadn't really thought about that, with her, before. She'd just been the girl with visions who came back with Duke. "Those poor people."

Nathan glances at the photo and sees one of the... spikes? Obelisks? Monoliths? He's not sure what they technically qualify as. But it's poking up from the ground at the base of a wall, disappearing into the wall halfway up, then appearing again to poke its tip from the roof of the home in question. He winces. More repairs for Haven's citizens.

Other photographs show one in the middle of the street that traffic is fairly unconcernedly driving around, and a few on unused patches of land, a few decorating gardens. Jennifer pins the last photograph. By and large they were brought to the police station by interested or outraged citizens rather than officially taken. She asks, "2001: A Space Odyssey?"

"They didn't look like this." He tries to remember anything about that movie. Space monkeys come to mind, but perhaps he's getting confused. "The geologist I called in, Gregory Aveby, should be here soon. He's dealt with Troubles before." Albeit with extreme prejudice.

Nathan adds more pins into his map that represent the verbal reports where, while Jennifer plays with bits of string connecting between the map and photographs, trying not to tangle his fingers.

"It's a circle," Jen says, her head poking underneath his arm.

Nathan's been thinking as much for a while, but wanted to get all the pins in place before jumping to conclusions. He likes them rather less as a circle than he likes them random. "That suggests some purpose other than just a... Trouble that grows rocky spikes from the ground."

What purpose, though?

"Coffee?" Jen asks, flapping her hands a lot, obviously having run out of things to do with them. Nathan nods, please, and she disappears. He sits and thinks in the abrupt quiet.

She seems to be gone for less time than the cartons from the coffee shop down the street she returns with imply. Nathan concedes that not all of the thinking he was doing while she was gone was about the case, and maybe he needs to focus. And stop wallowing.

"Thanks." He tries to be gracious as he takes the cup. He needs to get out of this room; needs to do something. But there's no sense flailing blindly. He needs some sort of plan. Even if it's to fight... mysteriously appearing rock obelisks. Aveby's driving from Camden. It'll be at least another hour before he arrives.

Of course. Nathan puts the coffee down and uses a rule to sketch out the centre of the circle with a few intersecting pencil lines. "There," he says. "Maybe it tells us something. Let's go knock on doors and see." He grabs his jacket.

Jennifer, who isn't obliged to go anywhere, picks up both coffees again and trots after him without complaint.

It's odd to have her there beside him in the Bronco, as different to Audrey as could be, chattering about things that it seems she knows miss the mark, just for the purposes of saying anything at all. But there's something about it that's comforting. She's new to Haven, new to the Troubles, doesn't have an axe to grind or even much of an opinion on his actions of last year, so far as Nathan can tell. Duke and Lexie (Audrey) are wrapped in each other and choked by guilt, but at least someone else still wants to talk to him about things that aren't work.

The centre of the circle is hard to define because it covers a large geographical area and nobody bothered to take accurate coordinates for every single spire. But he read a grid reference off the map and has an app on his phone to pinpoint the approximate area. That would be the new phone he bought since coming back to town and having access to his bank account again. It was weird how it hit him in a flood of relief, emotion, and odd hollowness how much he'd missed things like that.

He missed doing this, too. Not that Professional Punching Bag was entirely without job satisfaction, but it can't really come close to digging his teeth into a mystery, and it didn't do much to keep his brain occupied, only occasionally verging on concussed.

The area he'd pinpointed encompasses the Renolds place, a house that got lightning struck when Marion's Trouble went haywire, and the hardware store owned by Bob London. Neither Bob nor the Renolds are Troubled so far as Nathan knows, which mostly just means that they could be.

He leaves the foldout map on the hood of the Bronco, held down against the gathering wind by a flashlight and an oil can from the trunk. He asks Jennifer, who's pacing with a restless energy, "Are you sure you want to do this?" She isn't a member of the police department, after all. Like Duke, she has a Trouble that could make her useful on Troubled investigations, but Nathan's struggling to see how voices and mystery doors and a connection to the defunct Barn could help with this right now. Though Duke's Trouble has seldom actually been what he contributed, and right at the start... well, Nathan never had any idea why Audrey kept pushing to bring him along.

Jennifer snaps, "It's this or skulking around at the B&B thinking about going home... And if I've a part to play here... If I might be needed here..." Her fingers clench. Nathan understands that she wants to help, but after yesterday, it's become difficult to stay.

"I know," he says softly. "I just - questioning people who might have this Trouble could be dangerous."

"As opposed to killer blood and being burned alive?" she snips. "I think this is less dangerous." She looks defiant for a moment, then shrugs in half apology. They always rub each other up the wrong way, even when he's trying to be nice. This attempt to ride along with him is probably a bad idea.

His fears about the interviews prove unfounded. The Renolds are spending the summer away. Bob London leans in close to Nathan and says, "You, uh, you know about Crocker? Seems his family did a favour for mine a few centuries back." It doesn't mean they can't be Troubled through another family line, but if they're willing to admit one, why lie about another? Nathan makes a mental note of the possibility for later.

They can't raise an answer at the damaged house.

Considering that he was next best thing to a prisoner a week ago, Nathan Wuornos seems to have a distinct knack of getting things done. Within an hour of the geologist coming to Haven, there's a scaffold construction on the spike nearest the police station, which is on the edge of the street with some police tape around it. Chief Dwight comes out and regards it with some surprise before giving Nathan a look that says You got this and disappearing again. Which is fairly odd, when he's supposed to be the one in charge. Jennifer's still a little intimidated by Dwight - his size and the permanent fixture of the bullet proof vest might be as much a part of it as the rank - and isn't really sure how Nathan can be so emphatically not.

The guy Nathan called is wow grumpy, and puts his foot in it from the outset by asking, "Where's Officer Parker today?" as his one effort at social niceties.

"Day off," Nathan grunts.

"Who's this?" Aveby points at Jennifer.

"Consultant!" She darts her eyes at Nathan, nervously. Like Duke, right? "I'm a consultant?" She hopes Nathan catches the question in that and Aveby doesn't.

Nathan's mouth twists a bit but he just nods.

Nathan has to put his hand on the crystalline substance of the rock again to prove to Aveby that it won't do anything, and when that's scoffed at as proof (Jen thinks the geologist has an inkling that Nathan's not normal), Jen hugs it like a tree. Aveby tip-taps and scrapes and scratches at the rock, until eventually he gives the obelisk a real stinky look and says he's not climbing up it to examine the top. Nathan gets on his phone to call a scaffolder, and the conversation that follows is a bit sharp, because Nathan might know almost everyone in town but that just means they know they don't like him now. But the guy still shows and puts up a small scaffold structure ten minutes later.

There's sarcasm in Nathan's voice as he calls, "Thanks, Sid," as the guy is heading off. He gets a cross, "I didn't do it for you," in return.

Nathan climbs up first. The geologist gives the whole thing another dirty look and then follows, accepting Nathan's hand up at the top. Unlike everyone else, Jen doesn't think Aveby hates Nathan. She thinks maybe he just hates Haven, or the Troubles.

She looks at the ladder and the men at the top, then scrambles up, holding onto the skirt of her dress with one hand.

Nathan, registering her coming up behind them, looks surprised but leans around Aveby to offer her his hand, too. She realises it's difficult to disembark at the top, a matter of rising from a truncating ladder onto a platform with no hand-holds. Nathan's palm is dry and callused with work, rough with healing burns, and finds its grip in unnatural places because he can't tell where all the angles of her hand are and what shapes its trying to mould to.

Jennifer makes the mistake of looking down. There's a small audience of townsfolk around the base of the scaffold, not so much spectating for the obelisk (there are plenty more) as the effort to study it. Vince and Dave Teagues are heading up the street with notebook and camera in hand, eyes on their little party, too. Now that she's up there, she feels self-conscious. Who's she, after all? Also there's a tiny vertigo issue. They're fairly high and there's nothing to hold on to except one of the men, which she tries hard not to do.

The top of the rock spire is different from the rest of it, and that difference catches her interest and distracts her from those other matters. It doesn't reach a point, as she thought it did when she was looking from ground level. It forms a jagged edge that's sort of peeled back to reveal another completely different material embedded in the core, at the centre of the striated outer coating they can see. It's a dark colour, and is responsible for the outer rock appearing to be dark, because if you catch the angle right, look through the very edges, it's much lighter, even sort of transparent.

"What's inside?" Jen asks.

Aveby says, "Is it safe to get close? No funny stuff?" This guy has definitely been bitten by a Trouble or two before. He looks at Nathan, who of course obliges, by moving his hand... and he stops it before it comes into contact with the rock.

He holds his hand out at Aveby instead. "May I?"

Aveby unhooks a funny long-headed hammer from his belt and passes it over. Even though he's the one pushing Nathan to take the risk for him, he gabbles, "Be careful!"

Nathan taps the rock and it rings like metal on metal. "Guessing a high metallic mineral content," Aveby says. "Can you get me a sample? I'm not liking where this is going. Don't touch the core without an insulator between it and your skin. Should be fine with the rubber handgrip of that hammer."

Nathan pulls a face and hits it, harder this time, gritting his teeth as the shrill sound rings out with the blow. "Ow," Jen says, putting her hands on her ears. Nathan's blow did nothing but produce an affirmative sort of grunt from Aveby. He swings his arm back again and really goes for it.

Something pings off Jen's face and she yelps, "Ow!" much louder as the metal rings, putting a hand up to her cheek. A shard of rock falls into her palm. Jennifer stares at it blankly for a moment before she says, "Oh. Well I guess this stuff isn't dangerous," and gulps a nervous near-giggle.

"Sorry," Nathan says. He ducks his head and offers her something white fumbled from his crappy jacket pocket.

"Oh my God," says Jen, looking at the scrap of cloth he's handed over. She unfolds it. It's not like it's initialled, she supposes, but it's still an actual real-life handkerchief. When she looks at him again, it's like he's grown antennae. He's an alien.

His forehead knots as he darts a look back at her and provides, "It's clean. You're bleeding."

She lifts her hand to her face before thinking about it, handkerchief and all, and then feels slightly guilty as she pulls the clean white cloth away with a little red mark on it.

Aveby reaches out and takes the rock piece from her other hand. "Smaller than I'd prefer, but I can work with this. Best quit while we're ahead."

"Quit while we're already drawing blood," Jen comments, bobbing her head with a brief surge of sarcasm. She's pretty sure her and Nathan are at cross-purposes, because he seems pretty baffled by her reaction to the handkerchief. Doesn't seem to register how utterly it doesn't fit with his scruffy vagrant-chic hoodie and jeans and jacket.

He can't have looked like that when he was Chief of Police, but she hasn't given any thought to how he might have looked. Who is this guy, really? She's only seen what the winter made of him: Duke said he'd changed. Come to think of it, there's always been a pretty big discrepancy between the comments Duke made about Nathan in his stories and the scary drifter who was letting people beat him up for cash. It's just that...

Until now she was only focused on those stories with regards listening to Duke, the form and not the content, which she should know better. So the stick-up-his-ass, holier-than-thou, rule-stickler Nathan who presumably presented himself a lot more tidily than this one in order to be the cartoon officious ass to Duke's dashing rogue, well, he got lost in translation.

Is that guy still in hiding, or just wearing camouflage to distract the eye?

So now she's wrapping her head around Nathan being something more than fists and grime, an unwashed smell and a bad beard and "Where's Audrey?" Mostly "Where's Audrey?" since the return to Haven, the rest just hangover from a pretty damn overwhelming first impression. But "Where's Audrey?" definitely has to go, and when that brick tumbles it kinda takes down the sticky aura of the rest.

It's faintly annoying to Jennifer to realise she has to figure out who he is all over again.

Then she wonders if he's doing the same thing. If he knows how.

"So what have we got?" Nathan asks, once their feet are on solid ground.

"I've a vague theory," Aveby says, "that it's something to do with electrical conduction. A high conductive metallic material at the core, and the exterior's mica - a natural insulator." He curls a fist in his receding hair. "It's almost like a, a natural lightning rod, if there was anything natural about this. It sure as hell looks grown rather than made, anyway."

"Ah," Nathan says, and worriedly looks up to the sky. Dark clouds are starting to gather and the air is taking on a heaviness. He can't feel the air pressure but he can sort of sense something of that imminent-storm build-up in the air. "Is that bad?" They'll attract the lightning and ground it? That doesn't necessarily seem bad. In fact, considering the lightning damage from Marion's flare-up, it seems to him a good chance this Trouble is born out of somebody's desire to protect the town. Except when was there ever a Trouble without a downside?

Aveby shrugs. "Depends what else it's trying to do. Depends if I'm right. Depends on the bedrock beneath the town, and where that electricity gets siphoned down to. All I know is, it's focused in a very specific pattern, and whether it's supposed to catch lightning or do something else entirely, it's almost certainly going to field some strikes when that storm hits. Don't suppose you've any more a good explanation for what caused these things to appear than you did for what caused a whole house to get pulled underground?"

Nathan shrugs and offers, "You're the man we come to for the explanations."

The geologist snorts and looks disgusted but resigned. "It defies any explanation I've ever seen for how the earth's processes work that these things could've shot up in an instant." Nathan notices Jennifer just about managing to veil her amusement as she listens to the exchange.

"What's the worst case scenario?" he asks.

"I'm not a physicist," Aveby says, "But from what I do know, I can stab a guess that when the storm lights these things up, you could be seeing electromagnetic effects, permanent magnetic polarity changes in the rock your town stands on - as if it needs more wackiness - and possibly some land displacement, in the worst case, if the current triggers shifts within the rock. Gas could get released depending on the strata. Water. Could duplicate what folks try to do on purpose for gas extraction. I guess if the whole thing lights up it could even create some sort of ionizing field over the whole town, but I'm way out of my depth on that call. I need to do more research to give specifics on the strata and the potential for movement there."

"So it's bad?" Nathan says.

"Electricity passes between the sky and the ground every day. The energy of a storm gets absorbed without impact - that's why they call it grounding. It could do nothing at all. Fact is we still don't know everything about lightning as a phenomena, itself." He shrugs.

"...Huh."

"I need to get my equipment out and take a good look at the readings of what's going on at depth." Aveby eyes the sky. "I can tell you that when that storm gets here, I'm not planning to be standing next to one of these things, or inside the circle."

Nathan winces. "Is that a recommendation to evacuate?" People are battening down for the storm, keen to protect their property after the meteorite shower six months ago. It's a huge area. And most of the public buildings that they'd normally use to take those sort of numbers of displaced people are within the affected area.

"I'm not saying anything," Aveby emphasizes. "I just consult. And if you ask me, that's not worth the fees." He turns to Jennifer. "Quit while you're ahead, Miss." Turns back to Nathan. "I told you, right here, I'm out of my depth."

"All right," Nathan says. "Is the geophys scanning going to take long?"

Aveby gives him a look and Nathan waves his phone and says, "Call me when you get anything. Anything at all. Find out how deep down they go and if there's any chance we can get folks to work on toppling them before this storm arrives, first priority."

As he walks away, leaving the geologist to snap at the spectators bunched around his van, Vince and Dave included, Jennifer follows again.

"Just a simple small town cop?" she mocks him, gently.

"He's useful, but I don't intend to explain the Troubles to him. It's not as though he's going to like the explanation any better," Nathan tells her. Her outsider perspective on giving folks the runaround reminds him painfully of Audrey, when she first arrived. His chest develops an impossible ache. "We need to get these things down before the storm hits. Let's go see if we can do it the easy way, and talk the Troubled person down."

"You know who - oh. That house. The burned out one."

She's quick. Audrey wouldn't have needed to say so, he thinks. We'd have both known, and both knew we knew, with nothing more than a glance. "I need to find out who owns that property."

"Do we need Audrey? I mean, Lexie." She looks around guiltily, but there's no-one close to hear. "And Duke?"

Duke will be preparing the Cape Rouge to weather the storm. Audrey's probably still with him. As Lexie, two days ago, she'd commented loudly and rudely that slavery was illegal and negotiated a day off with Dwight and the Guard and a great deal of agitation. They're both outside the danger area, and the fact is that Nathan doesn't think he can face them so soon after yesterday. Even Jennifer doesn't look enthusiastic, and she'd been attached to Duke all of five minutes. "This is legwork and policework. We've got personnel. Nothing... Lexie... can do that we can't, right now. We don't even know who the Troubled person is yet." And maybe all he'll have to do to deflate this is point out the geologist's concerns to them. "I can talk to Troubled people. Talked down Marion. Don Keaton."

"And you got frozen and you got burned," Jen points out. "Are you really really sure this is the best approach?"

Nathan scowls. "I've got this. I don't need Audrey and I don't need Duke." Who's only a sponge, not immune to the Troubles either. Aveby's not willing to stick his neck out over evacuation, in fact he seems to think there's a significant chance of a best case scenario where nothing happens at all. "Let Lexie keep her day off. Maybe she can make it through one, Audrey never did."

"I'm sure they wouldn't mind, if it was for a Trouble." Jennifer leans against the Bronco, sliding her fingers over the paintwork. She's very tactile, Nathan can't help but notice. And seldom not moving, even just fussing with something between her fingers, or rocking a foot back and forth. It makes him feel strange to stand beside her, opening himself up for comparison, stiff and unfeeling and guarded.

Nathan opens the door for her, stops halfway. It's been nice not to be alone, but he can't justify this. "You don't have to tag along. I can get an officer to take you back. Is where you're staying outside the circle?"

She shuffles her feet. "Well, um... I checked out this morning. I was... Okay, so I was thinking about leaving. And then I found you, and I thought, maybe I'll hang around another day, try and get some more perspective on things before just quitting town... The thing is, I don't know where I'm going back to."

It hits Nathan that she's alone here and doesn't have all that much money. Not the money, certainly, for indefinite stays in hotels. She was off work on disability, locked in the false diagnosis of her visions, and if she was collecting benefits to live on, she ran out on those when she left Boston. She'd been staying at the Gull for free before Audrey came back.

"I'll get Vince to find you someplace to stay, if you want to," Nathan tells her. "No charge. After all, if you're here to be an asset to our town, to solve all this, then you shouldn't have to pay to stay here. I'm sorry I hadn't realised." Head full of Audrey... He shakes it, grimly.

"Thanks," she says. "But, um, I am okay doing this for now. Anyway." She lifts her eyebrows and gives him a slightly winsome smile, and he nods. Opens the door the rest of the way.

He thinks that she's sweet, and therefore, nothing he's got any right to be thinking about. They're from different galaxies.

He's been thinking a lot about Audrey, since yesterday. Thinking about his certainties over the winter crumbling to ruin. Thinking about how they never made any real declarations, any promises of love to one another. Now... Audrey as he knew her is gone. But maybe he was laying too much on that Audrey, as well. Maybe Duke was also always a choice. It would explain why he could look so startled when Nathan declared their true love.

He feels like his feet aren't on the ground any more, and he's still going to be the one to die - for the Barn, it's assuredly him who deserves to die - but at the same time, everything, everything looks different, the other side of yesterday.

Great going, Jen thinks. Get all creepy and clingy with Stinky Beardy Human-Punchbag Nathan! At least when you did this with Duke you had some inkling he was kind of interested back. Not like the guy who's just been thrown over by the love of his life... And this sucks, it - she sucks, because Nathan's an open wound right now, bleeding for Audrey, and she can probably get anything out of him that she wants if she so much as smiles for him. And she's not, can't be interested in him. She just wants attention from someone, anyone, because Duke picked Audrey faster than you can say "oh, snap" and her confidence is all over the place and she's just flailing out at the universe like an idiot.

Then again, maybe if Nathan's half of the equation was just someone, anyone, too, they'd be a matched pair, and she could jump his bones and embrace the train crash, because there's an outside chance it could actually do them both some good. Physical therapy, as it were.

"-What?" Nathan looks around sharply, and she blushes, pulling her hands back from where she just punched them into his dashboard.

"Nothing! Never mind!"

Meantime, they have a Trouble to solve.

They got in his car basically to drive up the street. It's literally no more than a few hundred yards. But they're outside the circle of obelisks - or lightning rods - here, and Nathan looks at the Bronco contemplatively as he gets out. "Maybe I'll swap for a squad car. I can do without lightning strike or... EMPs... or anything else screwing with her now." He looks up a second, hazy eyed. "Didn't think I was going to get her back after the winter."

Jen nervously lifts up her keys. "We can use mine?"

"Kind of defeats the point," he observes.

"Yeah, but I haven't had mine twenty years," she says. "Plus I'm pretty sure 'lightning strike' looks better on an insurance claim than 'attacked by killer plants', since it's already all scratched up from the other day." And she wants to actually help, and to assuage her guilt for sort of using him, the way she's doing, so if she wrecks her car completely, right now it feels like that is actually okay.

"If you'd rather," he agrees, looking dubious. She's noticed that he mostly lacks that particular male impulse to casts himself as protector of every female to cross his path, at least when they're not Audrey. He'll check, but tell him, Yes, I'm doing this and it's my prerogative to dive head-first into this horribly dangerous situation, and he'll nod and run with that. She doesn't know where that puts him between pragmatism and feminism and not caring, and maybe it just means he's not very gallant, or says something about his own grasp of self preservation (abundantly possible), or else that he defers to women. Jen could buy that after the force of personality of Audrey-Lexie, who's the one example she has of what floats his boat.

For now, though, they're not going anywhere but up the police station steps.

It's weird being in Nathan's office when Duke isn't there. She was there on the first day and Duke pulled her away, and she's been in there a time or two since but it's not like she's had chance to look around, scary evil blood puddle trying to kill them, etc. etc. Now she has that chance, she notices briefly Audrey's desk full of books on native mythology and Maine folklore, dusty under Lexie's nail varnish. Nathan's desk is organised, and he seems to get along with paperwork and his handwritten notes are neat - ish; a bit spidery, tiny writing - and more eloquent than the stuff that tends to come out of his mouth. There's a lot of paperwork. A few novelty stationery items are scattered about, plus an essential oil bottle that confuses her, and four small photo frames. Three of the pictures are of Audrey and the last one is of a small boy and his... father?

The boy doesn't look much like Nathan, but neither does Nathan, in the picture of Audrey that also has him on it. The older man looks more like Nathan, closed off and terse. "This is your father?" Jen asks, and only belatedly remembers Duke said Nathan was adopted anyway.

"Yeah... I need to use the computer for five minutes. Make yourself a coffee. There are probably donuts, uh, somewhere around." He waves a hand.

She makes herself a coffee and also him one, and thinks that he doesn't want much out of life, that he didn't even ask for the coffee, and it would've been totally normal, okay, to ask. He's so focused on the work, though, fingers rattling on the keys. She puts his coffee down next to him and ventures on a donut scavenge. Can she get booked for stealing donuts from cops? She scampers back with the purloined sugary products and leaves Nathan's next to his coffee. She picked sticky toffee. He doesn't strike her as a sprinkles man.

She wonders if Audrey were there, if he'd be all quick-fire snappy police patter instead of dead silent. If he ever does patter. Duke said he and Audrey had a geek cop braintwin thing going which, well, to her that suggests patter. That Audrey was that one special person with whom he had patter. Though she's seen that sometimes he does that with Duke, if arguing counts.

If she can't be Audrey, maybe she should try harder to be Duke and put her feet on the desk and make some jokes about... something. But at the moment all she can think of is a lousy elephant joke, and Duke's humour is smarter than that, and she's pretty sure it's not Nathan's sense of humour at all.

Instead of rattling around Audrey's desk and probably really annoying him, she goes to the ladies' bathroom and uses some tissues to pad at the cut on her face, which is a small, deep imprint where a sharp corner of the rock fragment struck hard rather than a cut, per se. Nathan hasn't mentioned it since he accidentally did it, which is very useful for squashing notions he's any kind of romantic hero after the handkerchief thing. Seriously, he probably just pulled it out of a drawer this morning without even thinking because he tends to end up bleeding a lot. He wasn't thinking of her, it was just a blood-to-thing for staunching blood connection.

She tries to rinse clean the corner of the handkerchief that's got blood on it, then squashes it between tissues until it's dry enough to put back in her pocket, though it's not really dry, and she can feel the little damp patch against her hip through her skirt. She finds she was wrong, earlier, about the initials - a tiny NTW in one corner. She wonders what the T stands for, and if he has cufflinks somewhere, too. If Nathan was a guy who ever wore cufflinks, which is really funny, somehow, in an ugly, mixed-up kind of way because he was a whole different person and she's seeing this... this trail of evidence for how that person was taken apart.

When she tentatively creeps back, peering through the window of his office, she sees him putting his jacket on. She has a moment to observe him unguarded, as he looks down at the coffee and donut like they're news to him and stops to take a long drink and a few hurried bites. Then he wraps the donut in the napkin she'd put it on to stop stickiness getting on his desk, and puts it into his drawer for later. He's finishing the coffee as he peers into a small mirror on the wall and uses his fingers to self-consciously wipe around his mouth.

Can't feel. Can't tell if he has food there, Jen's brain supplies. An odd sensation slides through her stomach. As soon as she gets that, it brings all this other stuff with it, like how would he know if his clothes were torn in embarrassing places, or if his food was too hot, or he was trying to chew on a fish bone? Can he walk with his eyes shut or does he need to see his feet on the ground? How does he kiss, hug, make love with anyone other than Audrey? He's not a weird kind of bad tempered real life superhero with a power that lets him shrug off punches, he's a person who can't do... a bunch of things, probably, that she takes for granted. Whose choices are reduced by this thing, as surely as hers were when she started hearing voices in her head.

She didn't even find out about his Trouble until she'd known him for days, and he hides it and Duke conspires to help him hide it - all those big slaps on the back, hard enough you'd think he was trying to knock Nathan down, and never relying on touch cues - and it's like he'd rather be this physical wall with flyaway emotions, most of them anger, than draw attention to the abnormality.

Jen remembers bandaging burned hands he can't feel. Suddenly it's so sad. Of course he'd imprint on Audrey like she was his personal messiah. What's the world like for him now, without even the potential of Audrey? Even if he lives, what else is ever going to be able to contend with that?

When he comes to the door, she ducks down, stifling a squeak. He stops and looks around with the door held open, searching up and down the corridor, and she pops up behind him, feeling stupid. Unsure why she feels the need to hide that she was watching him. What she saw was nothing overtly personal. It's only the revelation that she took from it that's personal.

Nathan tries to hide his jolt of surprise. "I know who owns that house, think I know where they'll be staying. Are you still in for the ride-along?" He makes a show of displaying his watch. "Coming up to lunchtime."

She's not sure whether that means go away in Nathan-speak. "Um... I'll pick up a sandwich. You want to stop at the bakery? Because you should eat, too."

She imagines that he doesn't much care about lunch when he can't feel the discomfort of hunger and lacks any pressing reason to look after his health.

He says, "Okay," and the line of his shoulders changes a little bit, in a way that can't really be called relaxing because he still looks like he's got a coat-hanger stuffed in there. What it is, is an admission. That he wants her company. That she's okay here. She's been waiting all morning for him to turn around and ask, exasperated, "Why are you here?" because she had this strong preconception that was what Nathan would do. Now for the first time she really starts to believe he isn't going to do that. She wants to hug him even more than she did that day at the park, except that would be the dumbest, craziest thing she's ever done and he wouldn't feel it anyway.

"I could eat," he says. "We'll do that on the way."

After barely knowing what to say to him all morning, she finds herself babbling like an idiot to fill the quiet space of all that air hanging between them in the car.

It seems manifestly unfair that Jennifer, who talks enough for three people, is sitting next to him in the car instead of with Duke, whose communication skills are broadly the same. Not that Nathan isn't used to the person next to him being more vocal than he is.

He hops out to grab them lunch, since she's behind the wheel now. Probably a good idea. All he's had since yesterday afternoon is half a donut and a lot of coffee. He'd considered drinking himself into a stupor, yesterday, but he's always been better at burying himself in work, and drinking that much would preclude having the concentration to do that today. Which was Lexie's day off, to boot.

It occurs to him to wonder if Audrey and Duke put Jennifer up to keeping an eye on him. But after an initial paranoia, he doubts she's on good enough terms with them. She was almost as rattled by yesterday as he was.

Back in the car, she takes a big bite from her sandwich and starts the engine. "Eat!" she urges him, trying to be dainty while talking around her crammed mouth. "I totally know you've not been, so eat, okay?"

Nathan takes a few bites between giving her directions, and then they're at Harrison Martlett's sister's house.

Martlett's not someone Nathan knows. Those are the easier interviews, these days. His sister, who Nathan doesn't know either, answers the door. "Oh, yeah. He's in the back. Come in."

They find the man staring out of the window in the sitting room. There's a camp bed still made in one corner, but he's standing by the window, eyes following on the first spots of rain on the glass.

Nathan takes one look at him and thinks of calling Audrey. It makes him cross with himself. He can do this. He's been doing this. "Mr Martlett-" he starts, and his phone rings.

It's Aveby, so he gives Martlett a look of apology and puts the phone to his ear, pushing open a patio door and taking himself outside to stand in the rain. "What's the news? Can we pull them down?" Dwight has a couple of guys who are actually already trying, out of sight in Mrs O'Hennessey's garden.

"Not a chance," Aveby says. "These things go way into the bedrock."

Nathan would think that was safer, but the geologist's tone says not. "What's the problem?"

"Haven's weird little fault system, for one. A bunch of strata rife for gas release with electrical stimulation, maybe. if the energy this oncoming storm releases gets focused and channelled down into those beds... Actually, there's a chance the fault system might help disperse the current more widely, but there's also a decent possibility we're going to see something give somewhere."

"Can we... cover the things up? Rubber sheeting? Insulate them from the lightning?"

There's a kind of blank silence in which Nathan figures that suggestion was stupid even before Aveby launches into his responding rant.

"It's already started raining. Air's going to be damp, these things stick up like a sore thumb, and there's forty-two of them within town boundaries. But, hell, if you want to drive around and put little hats on them and hope that works out, when you're playing against the majestic forces of nature at its wildest, you run with that. I'm not a physicist, and just because you can't get a physicist around here does not make me your all-purposes scientific advisor."

Nathan chokes. "Damn it, Aveby! Worst case scenario, okay? Is the town going to fall down around my ears?" Is there still time to evacuate? The rain is getting heavier, specking his sleeve, drops starting to meet. The sky flickers slightly, overhead. He clenches his jaw. Doesn't mean that was near enough for one of the obelisks to gather it up.

"No," Aveby says, after a pause. "Worst case scenario, I think we're talking mid-range earthquake type damage and electromagnetic weirdness. Best guess. Not a disaster movie, but it's gonna hurt. Especially for a town that's taken so many hits to its infrastructure already in the freak meteorite shower."

Nathan clasps his head with his free hand. "Best case scenario's still nothing?"

"Uh-huh."

"Percentages...?" Nathan asks, with faint hope.

"Fuck you," retorts Aveby. "Now, I've got my reports, I'm gonna leave them with Hendrickson - the hell happened with that, Wuornos? I thought you were calling me in on your Police Chief authority - and I'm packing up my gear and heading out."

"Okay," Nathan groans. "Look, about that-"

"Story for another time." There's the slightest hint of apology there as Aveby cuts him off, or maybe it's for what he says next. "I'm not obligated to stay around for the show."

"Of course not," Nathan says. "Go. If I have any more questions I can reach you on the phone."

"Yeah, sure. First thing to go's probably going to be the cell reception. Regular storm might knock that out."

Nathan ought to thank him, but he doesn't feel like it, and he cuts off the call and leaves the world's most pissed-off geologist to it.

"Are you gonna evacuate?" Jennifer's wide-eyed, waiting in the doorway behind him.

"No." Wait, wait, wait... The back of Nathan's brain cautions that it's not his decision. He's not the Chief any more. he needs to pass this choice to Dwight... Hell, probably Dwight's out there, already making it, because really? "There's no time. There's nowhere to put that many people. And they're safer indoors than caught outside in this." They can get the people in the houses that are right next to an obelisk over to a neighbour's place, though. He thumbs his phone again to call Laverne to get instructions out to do that.

He hopes Aveby's wrong about the phones going down. Chances are that police radios won't fare any better.

When he's done, he steps back inside the house. Jennifer touches his sleeve, like she's trying to brush the water off. "You're soaked."

He can't pay attention to that now. "Mr Martlett," he says, blindly shoving the phone away as he goes to the hunched man. "We need you to take down the obelisks. I realise you're afraid... I know that the last time a storm hit, it destroyed your home. But those devices could be more dangerous drawing the lightning off than letting it hit."

Martlett's staring at him like he's gone mad. "Obelisks?"

If he's picked the wrong guy, there's no time to find another. They're screwed. Or at least, dependant on blind chance that these things don't do the level of damage that they might.

"Come with me, please, Mr Martlett." He flips his badge on his way to getting the phone out again, to tell Laverne to have Audrey meet him at the station. He can, after all, talk to Martlett in the car. Jennifer's driving. But they should do this on the move, because they're running out of time. It's time to cover all bases. "I'm sorry, but it's important."

He's expecting more resistance as he hustles the frightened man out into the burgeoning storm. But the funny thing is that Martlett seems happier being outside under the rumbling sky, with its gathering lightning flashes, than he does under his sister's roof.

Maybe he's thinking of being trapped in the house when the lightning came down before.

Martlett's sister's place is a way out, and it takes ten minutes of Jennifer driving through the rain drenched streets to find the nearest obelisk. That's ten minutes Nathan spends trying to hammer into Martlett all the things Aveby said, the two men arguing back and forth in the rear of Jen's car.

"We've got to show him," Nathan had told her as they got in. "He isn't aware that he's done it."

But Nathan called for Audrey, which means he thinks this is bad, and it's bad enough driving through the pouring rain, when the wet ground resists her control of the vehicle and the rumbling and flashes of the storm make her jump, and wind is picking up to buffet the car. This is still only the storm's outer edge, and when it picks up, she's pretty sure people shouldn't be out in this. She's been suppressing her panic reaction of Oh my God, he isn't going to evacuate! but perhaps Nathan's right.

Jen's hands are shaking on the wheel by the time she pulls up next to - well, across the street from - a safe feeling distance from the nearest 'lightning rod'. The encounter doesn't seem to progress much better faced with the rock spire than it did in the back of her car, though. She wishes she had a raincoat with her as she watches Nathan pull Martlett across the road from where she parked. Martlett's the only one of them anything approaching dressed for the weather. The car that passes and honks at them in the low visibility is only the third Jen's seen since the rain really got going.

From the inaudible talking between the two men, obscured by the sound of the rain, she hears burst out loud enough to carry, "What the hell?! How would I cause this?" and sees Martlett back up the rise of his voice with the wide, agitated motions of his hands. "Have you been smoking something?! Let me see that badge again!"

"Mr Martlett, listen..." Nathan doesn't get handsy, he gets close; right into someone's personal space, and then holds his hands a fraction away from actually touching. Jen realises, Martlett doesn't even know about the Troubles. What if he IS the wrong person?

"You can't have been here for the meteor shower and not know about the Troubles! You think any town just gets hit by falling space debris? By this many gas leaks? Whispers, rumours, something!" Nathan's good at shouting. This is the Nathan Jen recognises. "This town isn't normal, its people aren't normal, and that's why things like this keep happening! You were afraid, because your house was struck by lightning, and your Trouble reacted to that. But this is not how to keep yourself safe this time!"

"You're some crazy freak cop! And I meant it about that badge!" Martlett plants his feet in a gesture of aggression and points at Nathan.

"It's not even focused around your sister's home! You're 'protecting' the burned out wreck of your old house!" Nathan gets the badge out and throws it, forcing Martlett to retract his hand to catch the badge against his chest. Nathan gestures emphatically down at himself, making Martlett's head swing back up. "You want proof the Troubles are real, then punch me, cut me. Won't bother me, I can't feel it." He's manic enough that Jen half expects him to draw his gun and hand that over, tell Martlett to shoot him, too.

"No!" she yells, scrambling out of the car. She's seen Nathan throw his body on the pyre enough times. "I - I hear voices." She's drenched within seconds, dripping like a waterfall by the time she's across the street. "It's really real."

Martlett doesn't do any of the things Nathan suggested, but he also shakes his head and thrusts the badge back.

Nathan sighs and swings around toward the car. "Okay... Okay. Audrey, then." He sounds exhausted.

They get back in the car, where Nathan stays quiet while Martlett talks in sporadic bursts about what's real and unreal, crazy cops and the shit they say about this damned town. Jen clamps her hands on the wheel and makes herself drive. Nathan's staring at his fingers, clenching and unclenching them, and Jen pointedly turns and gives him a Look, kind of anticipating him snapping a few to try and shock Martlett into acknowledging the Troubles. The problem is that his ability doesn't necessarily look supernatural, just crazy-self-destructive. Jennifer's ability is currently doing nothing at all.

"Stop, stop, pull up!" Nathan says as they turn a corner, his voice incredulous.

Jen blinks into the dark. Okay, she knows kids are stupid, and boys especially, but the group of teenagers kicking at and hacking lumps out of the soft mica shell of one of the obelisks on the grass verge across the way is just...

"The hell does it matter if they damage it?" Martlett asks sullenly, while Nathan's again getting his badge out and kicking the door open, lurching from the car and into a run.

"They'll get themselves fried," Jen says tartly. The public hasn't been warned of the danger as such, just told to keep away from the obelisks. They're not even all roped off, because there's a limit to what HPD can do in one afternoon and there are forty two of the things.

Nathan sprints over to the group, badge raised, other hand straying near his gun. Jennifer can't hear what they're saying, but the kids scatter. Nathan's arms fall back to his sides. She sees him turn and look at the obelisk, take a step closer, leaning down slightly, inspecting the damage.

A flash of lightning lights up the sky.

An instant after, the lightning is down there filling the street. The obelisk leaks white fire, the hole in its side Nathan had stopped to study becoming a highly visible concentration of charge. Jennifer clenches her hands on the wheel but it all happens too fast for her to even have chance to start the car. They're just lucky none of the arcs of lightning bouncing around the street fry them.

But she sees an arc of twisting light latch onto Nathan, and it seems that he's lit up for a long second, like he's suspended, frozen in the electrical burst, until she realises that that's just the afterimage on her eyes and he's already been blasted across the street.

"Holy shit!" Martlett wails, hands over his head.

Jennifer is out of the car and running towards Nathan's sprawled form, and doesn't remember the distance in between reaching him. She throws herself on her knees at his side, thinking, has his heart stopped? Does he need CPR? Is he burned? Is he dead? Electricity isn't arching over the street any more, but she can feel a fizz, a build-up in the air. She grabs Nathan by the shoulders. He's on his back, limbs loose, eyes closed, as relaxed as she's ever seen him.

"Nathan!" she yells in his face, and presses her fingers to his throat as she leans over him, desperately hoping for a pulse.

She feels hands curl around her waist, and his eyes click open, accompanied by an indrawn whoof of air. It's followed by a few more of those, as his eyes just stare at her, and his lungs struggle. His hands are doing strange things at her waist - shaking, but shifting, moving, managing to burrow under her damp clothes and find damp skin, in a way that makes her squirm because she's already wet and cold, but his hands feel colder.

Then he's tightening his grasp and rolling his shoulders up from the ground, and she's so stunned that she doesn't do anything as his face looms close.

His lips seize hers. She can't remember ever sharing such a desperate kiss. His hands have travelled up her body and one is on her shoulder, the other wrapped in her wet hair like it's the best thing in the world. She finds herself returning the kiss, albeit with a little high pitched, muffled complaint because he's not giving her much choice.

On some level it's fascinating to entertain the idea that he's kissing her, because he's such a dry, damaged, reserved sort of man. His lips are cracked, and gentle, for all the insistence of the kiss. He's softer than she knew, and she can really feel for the first time why Audrey would fall for this odd man, and why Lexie wouldn't.

He stops the kiss as abruptly as he initiated it and pulls back, heaving another breath. His eyes are wide and really shocky. He throws his arms wide, either side of himself, away from contact with her, and stutters an apology.

"Are you all right?" She's more invested in that question than the weirdness that just occurred. Except that the kissing thing means he's obviously alive, and that's swell, it's great. Considering however many thousand volts just got shot through him, she'd prefer a more informative answer to her question than more stammered apologies.

"Sorry... God, I'm sorry."

She wraps her fingers around his hand - which doesn't react under her touch, although for a moment there, it did, he did, and she's not sure what was going on with that - and tells him sternly, "Calm down."

Nathan stares up, mortified. It's not Audrey, it's Jennifer. Except... what just happened? He manages to find a spare hand - seems to have lost them in the dark and rain, his motor functions knocked for a loop by the lightning strike, as well as apparently his senses - and scrubs it over his face. The other... oh, yeah: she's holding it.

"It's all right," Jennifer says. "You were struck by lightning." Like she's talking to a child. "Can you move?"

Not while she's sitting on him.

Apparently he said that aloud - he's still not sure he can actually hear. The air is full of an almighty rushing like a huge river, and he thinks when she spoke, maybe he read that on her lips, or in the ether, because there's barely anything coming through to him but that single, overriding noise. Anyway, Jennifer shifts and scrambles off his chest, where she was straddling him.

...Where moments ago he was aware of her weight and the heat concentration between her thighs under that tiny dress, and-

He blinks, and draws up a knee. There's no strength in his body so he leaves it at that and sags again, lets his head fall back on the road. "I felt that," he mumbles, connecting the dots. Lightning. Fried his brain. "Felt everything again, just for a - just for a moment." And it hurt, everything so bright, and too much, and the only thing he had to cling onto was her, so he did. Some deep down association that leaped from 'person he could feel' to 'AUDREY', even though he could feel everything, and could see her, and with his own eyes. "The shock must have bridged some of those missing connections. It's gone now."

"Okay." Jen gulps. Her slim hands play at his collar. It takes him a moment to deduct that she's loosening it.

"Am I burned?"

"It's too dark to tell." She looks unhappy at the reminder that he can't tell.

"Is he okay?" Someone else is there, a dark face hovering over both of them, and Nathan squints in confusion, trying to piece together where they are, what they were doing, who else was with them. "Ow, man, that was crazy. That thing could've fried those kids for sure! They were all closer than him."

There's a chunk from beyond Nathan's sprawled-out feet. Jennifer and Martlett gasp, and Nathan climbs up onto an elbow just in time to see the last of the obelisk crumbling into dust and leaving, so far as he can tell, unmarked, empty tarmac, as though it had never existed at all.

"Hey, those things just..." Martlett starts, and shakes his head. He looks freaked out. Then his face wipes clean, like the road to repressing that it ever happened starts here.

Nathan remembers enough for relief to wash through him, and he groans and flops back again, but it's a good groan, even if he seems to have misplaced all his energy. "I'm fine," he grunts, answering Martlett. His limbs move, he's breathing; this Trouble isn't going to turn Haven into a hole in the earth.

"He's not fine," Jen says, rather sharply. "It's cold and he's soaked and he's just been struck by lightning and he's on the ground. Help me get him into the back of the car. We need to take him to the hospital."

"I'm fine," groans Nathan, who doesn't want to face being dragged through endless tests, and probably a scan of some kind, not to mention all of the waiting around. "Just need a sit down and a coffee. Rest of that donut. I'll be fine."

"You," Jennifer says, waggling a finger in his face, "are going to hospital. And don't argue. I have the car, and I'm not driving you anywhere else." She splutters with some incoherent thought that's trying to get out, and does, in the end. "...Every time you solve a Trouble, something like this happens. Most people would... would move! Or at least change their occupation."

Nathan nods gloomily, not disagreeing with her, but he says, "I think I'm stuck with Haven, and this one."

Martlett gets both hands under his shoulders, and says, "Hup!" The world tips. Jennifer curls her arms around his legs, and his eyes can't seem to pull away from her, with her hair falling forward over her face, her slim form struggling determinedly to help heft his weight; staggering all over the road because she's half his size. Her dress flaps damply around her and the rain adheres to her skin in droplets, sparkling and shiny, until other droplets land and cause them to run off, rearranging the picture.

Nathan decides he's probably not tracking. It's also difficult to get his breath. Somewhere between them picking him up and putting him in the car, he either passes out or just blanks, because next he knows he's on the rear seat. His head is in Jennifer's lap. Martlett is driving.

"I'm sorry... about the kiss," Nathan manages to get out. He's also sorry about the groping, but it was difficult enough to make himself get out the word kiss. He figures she'll take it as all-inclusive.

"It's okay." Her little huff suggests she's tired of hearing it. "Just don't forget that I have a free pass now to do something wildly intrusive or stupid next time I feel like it."

Nathan thinks he could sit up now, his limbs beginning to recover from their shock, strength returning. Certainly it's easier to move and his instinctive sense of where everything is seems to have returned. The truth is that he doesn't want to move. It's not just because with his luck, there has to be a fairly large percentage chance he'd throw up in Jennifer's lap and/or fall off the seat.

Spending most of the afternoon, well into the evening, waiting around in the hospital is not Jennifer's idea of fun. Duke and Lexie turn up, when the news reaches them. They weren't needed at the station after all, and Nathan's probably going to kick himself that he had to call them. By that point, Nathan's gone in for his scan and they don't get to see him. The weird doctor, Lucassi, does his best to reassure them that Nathan's going to be all right. Jennifer sees palpable concern on Lexie's face; she's so sad and conflicted, and clutches Duke's elbow like she needs to reaffirm her choice, reinforce it.

"You're soaked," Lexie says to Jennifer, not quite an afterthought, but Jen can't blame her for not jumping to it straight-off. "You should come back with me and get changed."

"No, um, I would rather stay here. Besides, everyone's wet. I don't want to stand out." She wrung her clothes out in the ladies' room and they're kind of starting to dry, now, anyway. That or she's reached a point where she's all zen about being soggy. She fought for a while for position in front of a radiator against an old woman and some kids, but that didn't last long before she caved. "I was there when he was hurt, we came in my car, I figure I'll wait to take him home. Okay?" She injects a little unintended force into that last part.

She watches them grasp that other alliances have shifted than theirs, and they look more relieved than anything else as they go.

Jen doesn't think Nathan's ready to see them yet, anyway. Especially not when he's flat on his back. If he's prepared to die for them, she can't see the avoidance lasting forever, but not today, not this soon, not when he needs space from them most of all.

When the hospital finally release Nathan, he's walking on his own two feet, albeit stiffly. His clothes are dry-ish and look rearranged, but she saw him, anyway, in a hospital issue gown before he went in for his scan. He's carrying his jacket and his shirt sleeve is rolled up to reveal a reddened pattern that looks like a tree, its fractal branches growing out from a single root at his wrist, which he displays to her with bleary-eyed wonder. It stretches up past his elbow.

"It's called a Lichtenberg figure," he says, sounding fascinated. "It's where the lightning went in."

Jen oohs over it even though the churning in her gut wants to go ick instead. But it is cool and really creepy-gross both at the same time, and she can tell Nathan thinks it's awesome, and she'd bet anything that Lucassi was totally psyched, too.

"It'll be gone in a few days," he adds, grasping that she doesn't altogether buy into the awesome.

"How is, um, everything else?"

"A few superficial burns. The lightning heated the air in my lungs, too, that's why I'm so short of breath. Maybe did stuff to my nervous system that they can't diagnose because it's-" he coughs "-functionally beside the point. Lot of bruises, nothing broken. I really am fine. I'm tired."

Jen touches his arm, the one that's not burned in pretty patterns. "Let's get you home."

"You'll need to watch him, tonight," a nurse instructs, businesslike, over Nathan's shoulder. "We're releasing him conditionally. Call us if anything changes for the worse."

Jennifer watches Nathan's face go bright red, though the nurse can't see it happening. Jen doesn't think she blushes, probably helped by the fact her face still feels ice cold. "It's okay," she reassures both of them. She doesn't have a place to stay tonight anyway, and it's way too late to think about bothering Dwight to arrange something.

It's dark as they leave the hospital. Not storm-dark, almost night-dark; the storm is clearing up. They can spot the odd bit of damage as Nathan quietly gives directions to his home, sitting beside her in the passenger seat. He seems oddly compressed, smaller and quieter and less angry and altogether less scary. Calmer. She wonders if being struck by that much energy can be some kind of spiritual purge.

Or maybe he's just exhausted.

Otherwise, it seems like the storm mostly passed through Haven safely.

Nathan's house is cute, and old, and even kind of twee. Jen doesn't have much chance to gawk at that - though already, she's had more than enough chance to be disabused of other notions she held about him, today - because its owner's asleep on his feet, and it's quite the struggle to get him inside his cute, old, twee little house.

She fumbles with his keys at the door, him leaning opposite her against one of the wood beams that prop up the porch. A big moth plays unnoticed around his slightly fluffy hair. His expression is distant. She's unsure what's prompted his loopy smile. The porch light and the night's shadows make him look older than he is.

Jennifer is horribly aware suddenly that she kind of... of claimed him, in front of Lexie and Duke, and now she's invited herself here to his house, having invited herself into his work all day, and she has no real idea what she's going to do with him.

Fortunately, he's too tired to push any decisions upon her. She helps him through the door and determinedly asks, "Bedroom?" because he's faltering even as they go, heavier on her shoulder with each step. They just about make it up the stairs like that and he drops onto the bed like a stone. He manages a few semi-helpful shifts at first while she's trying to get him out of his clothes, then falls asleep and leaves himself at her mercy.

She - behaves, and pulls off his jeans, grateful they're so loose on him, and his socks, and puts a fresh blanket from the wardrobe on top of him, because he's lying on the others. She can't help but notice that he's, well, he's lovely. Not so ripped as Duke, perhaps. A bit scarred, a bit battered, but all long limbs and finely toned muscle, and less skin-and-bones than she'd expected.

She stands in the centre of the room's floor space on a rustic beige rug and listens to his raw breathing, loud but perfectly rhythmic in his damaged throat, and it doesn't seem like she has to worry about that sound coming to a sudden stop.

...In more ways than one. She saw Lexie, at the hospital, and she's not blind, though Nathan's enough in denial he might as well be. Lexie, Audrey, so concerned for Nathan's life and health, is not going to kill him; he's not a disposable second choice, no matter how he's choosing to frame it. That doesn't mean his life is safe - the Guard might still end it, and there are Troubles every day, and twice most Tuesdays, but he's altogether less a walking dead man than he thinks.

Jennifer is suddenly, fiercely glad.

She goes to shut the wardrobe and smiles quietly at the suit jackets and pants, and ohmyGod vests, and... and skinny jeans that look like they've been ironed. Lurking alongside those are a few items more worn that have a sort of preppy outdoors-y look to them.

It seems Scary Beardy Smelly Punchbag man used to be wholesome. But it hardly matters now. There's a pile of items slung on a chair, the ones he's been wearing lately. She doesn't believe, either way, that the other guy is packed away with all the square clothes, with the Chief. He's not fooling her anymore. Is he still trying to fool himself?

She leaves the door of the bedroom wide open, to watch over him, and judging him to be thoroughly out for the night, shelves any worries and narrows her focus to getting out of her cold, wet clothes, finding something suitable to eat, and finding somewhere suitable to sleep.

She finally remembers after ten minutes under his shower what being warm feels like again. She emerges in a towel, creeping guiltily past the room where Nathan is sleeping, but he's still oblivious to the world and her state of undress with it.

Downstairs, the kitchen's stock is pretty basic, or at least everything seems to be tins or dried ingredients, though enough of the latter to suggest he cooks somewhat. She decides that's what's left after his long absence. The fridge is empty and there's nothing fresh. She didn't expect there'd be gourmet meals to be had in his company, but she suspects he can do better than this.

The books on his shelves intersect with the ones on her own back in Boston on world affairs and politics and society, though criminology and studies of serial killers are more than she can stomach. His DVD collection is nuts - high-brow international stuff and old black and white movies next to kids' cartoons. A big home filing cabinet in one room has tray drawers full of crafting equipment and she has the horrible feeling that the various crafty trinkets dotted about the house were actually made by him.

Her head reels and she has to sit down on his sofa to eat her can of beans, and start thinking again that whole circular thought process about how she doesn't know what she's doing here. She's politer than this. She doesn't just barge in on someone else's life. Except she's never been particularly polite to Nathan and he needs someone, right now, who isn't polite. It's not about the nurse's instructions. He needs someone to make him pick up all of this, this, this stuff that's the dismembered parts of the person he left behind. Someone to make him get up and think about living, and start being more than some Trouble-fixing shadow.

She's tired enough to sleep on the sofa, only she's not planning to be so easily extricated from his life tomorrow, so she heads upstairs and sees about excavating the single bed that she saw in the box room from its accumulated sediment of junk.

When Nathan wakes with light streaming through the open curtains that makes him shut his eyes again fast, with his memory of how he got to bed last night decidedly hazy, at first he thinks that he climbed into that unopened bottle of scotch in the cupboard that's been there since the Fall. Audrey chose Duke instead of him. Even though he shifted the world for her: destroyed the Barn, stopped a cycle that had been marching onward for centuries.

Maybe that's why she doesn't want him. He always had a knack for screwing up the grand gestures.

For an indeterminate time, lying there, he's thoroughly depressed. Doomed anyway. Just needs to persuade Audrey to go through with it. That should be easier, now.

The actual events of the day before are slow to return to him, but still jarring as they land. Inexplicably, he feels his mood start to lift. Yesterday wasn't hopeless. He solved a Trouble, Jennifer helped, and there's at least one person in town who doesn't regard his life as a commodity, who he can still talk to.

He rolls over, determined to make his way out of bed - he's not hungover, he got struck by lightning - and he'll turn in to work today even if it does mean having to speak to Audrey, and probably Duke as well.

The clothes he wore yesterday are wrinkled from getting wet and smell fusty. The rest of the stuff he's bought in the last six months, or since returning, just smells. He never made it to loading the washing machine yesterday on account of the lightning. Irritably, he grabs jeans and a shirt that look acceptably casual from the wardrobe and hangs up the crappy leather jacket on the door to finish drying out. Nobody's going to notice what shoes he wears anyway, he figures. His hair seems fuzzy and flyaway, and he spends a few minutes glowering and trying to forcibly flatten it with his hands in front of the mirror, then goes to look for some sort of product that he can't even remember the last time he used.

He's not expecting to head downstairs and find Jennifer at his kitchen table, reading a book from his shelf in one hand while she pokes at a bowl of porridge that smells strongly of honey and has about half a packet of raisins floating in it.

He stands and blinks, and suddenly several other things crash down on him from yesterday, including that embarrassing mistake of a kiss and who must have put him to bed last night.

He makes a choked noise. Jennifer looks up and frowns at him in a bafflingly critical way and says, "You need to buy milk," like it's a terrible accusation.

"I don't need it," he says gruffly, and sidles past her to pour out the blackest, thickest cup of coffee he can. A pick-me-up against lightning strikes. His voice sounds horrible. He takes a gulp of the dark liquid, then holds it out, displaying it as evidence.

Jen's foot taps against the table leg in a sharp little rhythm. "Okay, we need milk," she amends, "because I can't deal with this stuff made from water, and black coffee makes me hyper, and seriously, you know you do not want to see that every morning. And oh my God, Nathan, you need shopping. Do you even know what home comforts are?"

Home comforts, since Nathan got back, have meant knowing he'll be able to make himself a coffee in the morning when he wants one, or feed himself from the frankly staggering array of food he had left in his cupboards whenever he wanted to eat. He hasn't really got over that excitement yet. With dying beckoning, even if he'd thought about it, he wouldn't have seen much point in buying anything fresh.

Jennifer is blushing quite heavily, and he doesn't feel up to telling her how winter redefined his notion of comfort, so he just says, "Okay," and watches her sort of deflate. She deflates way beyond the point he expects and plants her face on the table, hair just missing the porridge, where she mumbles something into the table top that he doesn't catch.

Nathan clears his throat and says, carefully, "We can go now, before work, if you like. When you've finished that." He eyes the porridge.

She shoves it away from herself without lifting her head. "I'm done."

Nathan thinks, okay, and picks it up and starts eating, sliding into a chair. He wonders, as the seconds stretch, how to approach unpeeling Jennifer from the table and tackling whatever problem this is.

He's never understood her. Now, she's in his house, and it seems like she's planning on staying. After being homeless for six months, and not having a use for the house in his foreseeable future, he's not going to contest her staying, but it's daunting.

He gobbles the rest of the porridge fast, and puts the bowl aside, gulps more coffee for fortitude, and starts, "Um..."

Jennifer raises her head. "I'm really sorry," she says quickly. "I know I kind of - I completely pushed myself upon you, last night-" Nathan's moment of terror as he thinks she's referring to some intimate encounter he's lost all memory of has to be plain on his face, as she wildly shakes her head and yelps, "No! Not - I mean, I stayed in your house. But I didn't have anywhere to go and the hospital said to keep watch on you, and... I'll go today, I will, if you want me out. I'm not like this. I wouldn't do this. Only... you kind of guerilla-kissed me, yesterday, and I told you, didn't I, that that gave me a free pass for one stupid, intrusive thing in return. I figured that staying was-" She sort of ducks her head into her shoulders, retracting it like a turtle. "But I guess maybe that only really reasonably buys me the one night."

Nathan's brain needs an extra moment to catch up with the barrage of words. By that time, she's standing and grabbing her bag. He gets up and intercepts her before she can reach the door. "Jennifer, it's okay." They stop. Her mouth works silently. Maybe she needs more than that. "You don't have to leave."

"Really?" He can see her holding her breath.

"Really. I... need you to give me a lift to work." Where the Bronco is still. She pouts, letting him know that the glibness doesn't work, not even with an awkward little laugh thrown in as a sweetener. "Uh. I want you to stay."

The breath rushes out of her, then she's back, flouncing around the table, arms going as she talks. And talks. Nathan reasons it's a nervous thing. "Well, that's good, because I figured, hey, if we're both the losers here, we might as well be losers together. And you need someone - you obviously need someone to remind you that you're not actually dead yet, and maybe stop you throwing yourself straight into the path of any oncoming Trouble that you find. It's like a new new start-"

"Wait!" Nathan holds up his hand because some of that sounds - all right, he felt her yesterday, and God, he wants her, he does, when that memory drifts over his mind, and unintentional, accidental or not, he can still imagine her body under his hands and lips. The last thing he felt isn't Audrey any more, and that could keep him going a while - longer, fuelled by her presence in his arms, if he wasn't a little... okay, a lot afraid to dive into anything, post-Audrey.

Jennifer's not being crystal clear about what she wants of him. But there's at least a possibility in there that he... needs to address.

His days are numbered. There are things he just can't start.

"Don't get attached," he says, voice lowering as she frowns at him with increasing force. "You can stay here, but... you know what I have to do."

He can't fully read the expression she's wearing as she responds, "I know you're determined to be Duke's lightning rod, even if Lex.. Audrey isn't killing anyone." Then, as he's blinking at the confidence in that assertion - it's impossible, Audrey has to, with everything that's at stake she can't not - she says, "Three questions."

The table is between them. Jen rests her hands on it, wide apart like she's planning on interrogating him.

"Go on," Nathan says warily. What now?

"What does the 'T' stand for?" She pulls out the handkerchief he'd forgotten passing to her yesterday and points to the initials in the corner.

"Thaddeus."

She snorts, amused.

...Okay.

"Do you, um, where are your initialled cufflinks? Because I saw the shirts and the suits and the vests-" she looks exceedingly amused for reasons he can't begin to explain. "But I didn't exactly go through all the drawers."

"I don't have initialled cufflinks. Any cufflinks." They're too hard to fasten and unfasten handily, without touch, he'd just end up losing them.

"Okay." She looks pleased, and that was a test of exactly what? "Last question, then. What did the elephant say to the naked guy?"

He thinks his jaw drops slightly as he blinks at her.

She blushes furiously and finishes, "'Hey, cute, but can you breathe through it?'"

Nathan snorts, amused despite himself, and he doesn't know if that means he passes or not, but she says, "I just had to get that out of my system. Let's go shopping." She grabs her bag again. "I wanna find some decent breakfast product. They say it's the most important meal of the day, right? Though I don't know why, I mean, I figure... I can go without a breakfast or a lunch, if I'm busy, just bolt a candy bar, you know? But an evening meal? ...How about we give your cooker a real shock and cook something tonight?"

Nathan gulps the last of his coffee and bangs the cup down on the table with unintentional force in his rush to follow her out the door. He's still not sure what this is, because he didn't think she so much as liked him, before yesterday, but the whole offer she's laying out seems too intense for her to be casting him as a temporary substitute for the more easy-going charms of Duke, which he can't hope to match if that's the kind of thing that she likes. But he has a funny feeling that he's forcibly acquired a life partner by mistake, when his life is measured in weeks, if not days...

He sort of feels like he's been struck by lightning over again.

Still, it seems that she likes horrible jokes - could it be there's an unflattering comparison there? - and he can do those. Three, by the time they've walked down the drive, and she's groaning at him as she's getting in the car.

"Stop it, stop it, stop it!" she yelps. "Stop that, you... you Smelly-Beardy-Punchbag Man!" Her fist bounces off his shoulder even as he's whooping for breath in the startled aftershock of the nickname, and the gesture on top of that almost stops his breath completely.

It's not a kiss, or not anything anyone sane would take as a promise. But it's contact, and a gesture of affection and familiarity, out of nowhere.

For the first time since he came back to Haven, maybe since the meteors were falling around the Barn, Nathan starts to wonder what might happen if he gets to live.

END