She's startled awake by a sharp movement that jostles her whole body. Surrounded by maple and pine, she's not scared or disoriented. Nathan's here, with her, and though his eyes are wide in the morning sunlight, she doesn't see any discomfort (any regret). If she had to guess, she'd say that in their sleep, she probably moved, brushed some of her skin against some of his, and the shock of it jerked him awake.

"Parker," he says, his voice sleep-roughened, so beautiful that she is suddenly sick with wanting tens of thousands more days waking up to this, hearing him say her name, looking at him looking back at her with that look in his eyes.

"Good morning." She's determined not to let this get awkward (not to let them slip back behind the vestiges of that wall), so she smiles at him. "How about pancakes?"

His lips twitch upward (a touch of relief that she's not running away either). "Only if I get to make them. If your coffee last night is any indication, I'm a safer bet."

"Wow, low blow," she scoffs through laughter. "That means you have to make the coffee too."

"Already planning on it." There's a gleam in his eyes she hasn't seen in too long. That and his warmth (her own warmth that must be the first he's felt since Ian Haskell took his Trouble away so temporarily) makes it hard to roll away from him. In the end, he's the one who finally stands and ducks into the bathroom with his belt and shoes in hand.

Outside her apartment, there are a thousand things she should be doing. Five days left. So little time to figure everything out and help all the people still waiting for her. But. But if she does only have five days left, then when she leaves, the Troubles will leave with her. And right now, Nathan's alive. He's alive, and he's hers, and the Guard blame him and the Rev's followers hate him and the town ignores him and the skinwalker is probably keeping an eye on him...and he's safest with her, right here, at her side.

(Somehow, if she only has five days left, she can't think of a better use of those remaining hours than to make sure Nathan is happy and safe.)

Eventually, Audrey realizes that Nathan's been in the bathroom for a long time, long enough for her to drag herself out of bed and dress and check her phone. It's been a while since their few days together at his house, but she doesn't remember him taking this long to get ready in the mornings, particularly before pancakes and without any clean clothes.

"Nathan?" She knocks at the door. "Nathan, you okay?"

There's no answer.

"Nathan!" she calls again (the skinwalker, the Guard, the Rev's men, anyone, everyone, all the people who don't seem to see Nathan the way she does). Her gun's in her hand, panic clawing at her throat. (She remembers standing outside his bathroom and watching for smoke or the smell of ash to alert her that the killer was burning him alive from the inside out.)

Still nothing.

Audrey kicks the door in, gun raised, finger on the trigger.

The first thing she notices is blood. Blood on the sink, dripping down in pinkish trails to puddle with the water on the floor. The faucet's running and there's blood all over Nathan's hands. His eyes are frighteningly blank. Frenzied. Fixed on his arm.

On the tattoo.

No ashes and smoke this time. No flames or charred flesh. No crazed serial killer with a Trouble.

Just betrayal and disillusionment and pain. Just Nathan's own red-stained fingernails clawing strips down his forearm. Just deep scratches peeled through the tattoo Nathan believed meant helping the Troubled, protecting the defenseless, fixing the broken.

"Nathan," Audrey breathes, and only then does he seem to become aware of her presence. And then, a second delayed, of what he's done to himself.

The embarrassment is so plain on his face, his humiliation so acute, that Audrey almost retreats just to pretend that she hasn't seen just how not okay he really is.

But that hasn't worked before. In fact, it's only made things worse, leaving her scarred deep and Nathan believing he's alone.

"You know," she says as she sets her gun aside in favor of gauze, "there are easier ways of getting a tattoo removed."

He doesn't respond, but he also doesn't pull away when she goes to dab ointment on his scratches, so Audrey counts it as a win. Gradually, as she focuses on the scratches ripped into his arm, Nathan's breathing calms, goes from ragged to steady; in turn, Audrey's own heartbeat slows back to nearly normal.

"I don't think you should get it removed," she finally murmurs. "This symbols means to guard, Nathan, to protect, and that's what you've always done for me, for the people who need it. Don't let them take that away from you."

"Your guard." His voice is low, raspy, his eyes on the floor. "Lately, I've felt more like your opponent. Willingly or not, it seems like we're always on opposite sides now."

"We're not!" she cries.

"Then don't leave. Don't let the storm or the Guard or the Troubles take you away. Haven needs you. The Troubled need you." His voice catches in his throat. "I need you."

"And I'm here." Cradling his hands in hers, Audrey feels her own throat closing up. "Nathan, I...I'm sorry that I pushed you away. I thought...I thought it'd be better-easier-if you didn't care so much when-"

"I care." It's as much a promise as an admission, a statement of fact and a lifelong vow all rolled into one. But as soon as he makes it, he retreats, deflating slightly. "Not that it matters. I haven't been able to find James or the skinwalker-everyone's using me against you-I thought the Guard would help me, but instead they...they could have made me hurt you. Some Guard I am."

"But you never give up. That's amazing, Nathan."

He quirks a brow, too purposely casual. "My stubbornness?"

"Your tenacity," she says, following his retreat (maybe just a bit stubborn herself). "Your devotion. I don't think you know how much I depend on that. On you."

Their eyes catch, lock, unravel everything between them until Audrey has never felt closer to another person (surely, surely, memories or not, this is unique in all her lives; only Lucy and maybe Sarah, surging with her love of James, could come close, Audrey is sure).

"Audrey." His exhale on her name stutters against her cheek, his hands actually move to wrap around hers (to hold on), and Audrey forgets about her expiration date. Right now, there is nothing other than this. Her apartment swirls around them, a shifting melange of colors, Nathan's scent mingling with hers, all of it making her dizzy.

Dizzy and slow, and his blood is on her hands and he's trying to tell her something even if he can't quite get it out and...

And Audrey doesn't want their moment to be like this, not with Nathan, not when he means so much to her (I always have loved you, in her own broken voice whenever she tries to shy away). Nathan isn't something she wants to just fall into, incidentally, just because. He's the one she chooses, voluntarily, knowingly, of her own free will, because she wants to. He's worth a forever, and even if she can't give him that, he's worth more than a dizzy moment and a blurred morning.

She's not stupid. She knows there will never be a perfect time. But there will be a right time and this isn't it.

Either Nathan sees her decision in his eyes or he comes to the realization on his own (whatever he's trying to tell her caught up behind his silence), because he leans back when she does, lets go of her hands when she releases his, stands in tandem with her.

"I'm not going to give up," she promises him (the promise he's been waiting for since he first learned she was fated to vanish), and she thinks it means more to him than any dizzy kiss would have.

It's hard to focus on the progress bar on her computer screen rather than Nathan leaning down beside her, his face directed toward the screen while their eyes flit shyly toward each other, grazing and missing and seeking all over again. He's so close she imagines there is a magnetic field keeping them just so close but no closer, drawing and repelling in equal measure so that they are stuck, mesmerized into motionlessness.

The beep of her computer alerting them that the composite has been completed jolts both of them. Audrey feels the hairs on her arm raise in reaction to Nathan's proximity, but she forces her attention to the screen.

"All right," she says, "time to find out what this skinwalker's been building."

"Who she's been building," Nathan corrects.

For all the holes in her memory, Audrey really didn't expect to recognize the Frankenstein body the Bolt Gun Killer's been putting together piece by grisly piece.

But she does. More than recognize the face, Audrey can put a name to it.

"Arla Cogan."

"Cogan?" Nathan frowns. "Like James Cogan?"

"He was married. Duke and I found a picture of their wedding-the back of the photo said James and Arla Cogan."

"The skinwalker is...what? Your daughter-in-law?"

Audrey can't help but glare. "Do not call her that."

"But it makes sense, right? Didn't your kidnapper tell you that she loved him too?"

"Yeah, but..." Audrey swallows, not quite sure how to put her revulsion, her compassion, into words. "James must have loved her. I mean, to marry her, he must have wanted to spend his life with her. Maybe they didn't even know about her Trouble at the time. But then James died or disappeared, and Arla...turned into the Bolt Gun Killer. A monster, and all because someone she cared about was gone, taken away for no reason."

Nathan squints at her for a long moment (her skin prickles under the combined temptation of his nearness and his close regard). For an instant, she'd almost swear there was a secret in his eyes, but then he snorts and the moment passes. "If you're trying to say that you think I'm going to turn into a serial killer if you disappear, don't bother. You're not going anywhere. Or," a twinkle gleams in his eyes, hidden behind a deadpan expression (and if it's forced, neither one of them will admit it), "if it will keep you here, I guess go right on ahead suspecting me of having murderous tendencies."

Surprised into a laugh (and it may be strained, too, but at least she isn't spiraling in a downward slope of what-ifs and could-have-beens), Audrey shakes her head. "That wasn't what I was trying to say, but keep talking like that and we'll see if I have any murderous inclinations."

"Oh, you do." Nathan stands to retrieve the printout of Arla Cogan's picture. "I've seen you at a baseball game when your team was losing, Parker-everyone should be scared of you."

"When?" Audrey demands, but she already knows the answer, can picture the day in her head, back when she went to a game because Chris was there coaching, can see Nathan sitting in the stands opposite her.

Abruptly uncomfortable (desperate not to bring Chris Brody into the room with them), she quickly says. "And anyway, I've seen you when you're on the edge of a deadline, so don't pretend that you can't get ultra-intense and hyper-focused-both very good traits to have if you're looking to start a new villainous career."

"Since you're not going to disappear, I guess we'll never find out."

"Nathan." Audrey waits until he looks up from his close study of Arla's picture (she hasn't missed what he's admitted, purposely or not, in comparing him and Audrey to James and Arla, a married couple). "If there's one thing you're not, it's a killer."

A strange expression flits across his face, something dark and unfamiliar that turns his shadow of a smile into his habitual brooding expression. "Audrey," he says, "back when you were taken, I... There's something you don't know. More than one something."

"Ooh, a secret?" Audrey manufactures a grin (anything to dispel the tension blanketing the sparks she's been so enjoying between them). "Like your decoupage?"

"When you were taken, I...I thought it was Duke. The skinwalker left enough evidence to distract me by going after him, and I fell right into the trap. I went to confront him. With a gun. And if Wesley Toomis's Trouble hadn't interfered...maybe I would be a killer."

"Not that I believe that, but...why are you telling me this?"

"Because," he squares his shoulders, "you've been saying these things like...like you think I'm someone I'm not. Someone effective and...good."

"And you don't think you're good?" Audrey demands, bristling.

"I'm saying that until you came to Haven, I let life pass me by because it was too hard to break free of the mold they made for me. I'm saying that all the people I've helped have been because of you. I'm saying that I could never be what Haven needs, that I don't know the right things to do or say. I'm saying that there's something that happened, something in the past, that you should probably-"

"So what? So you're not perfect? Nathan, I know that. But you are good. I don't care what happened in the past to make this town treat you the way they do, you helped the Troubled way before I got here. You talk to people even when they treat you like a pariah. You throw yourself in the line of fire all the time to save people." Audrey ignores all caution in favor of taking his hand, watching him unfold (his arms falling from across his chest, his shoulders curling in toward her, his face tilted down), and say, "You're the best man I know, Nathan. Trust me," she smiles, heart thumping madly when he stares with that more pouring out of him, "I don't let just anyone be my partner."

Duke's name is on his lips; she can all but see it there, a stone ready to be heaped up on the detritus of that fallen wall between them. But he swallows it back, sets the stone aside in favor of a tiny smile, and remains unbent, open and vulnerable and hopeful.

And for the first time in a long time, Audrey chooses to believe that these will not be their last moments.

An evening spent with Claire, even if just to try to narrow down the skinwalker's current disguise, sounds perfect (or as perfect as she'll get since Nathan said he'd be busy all night at the Herald tracking down leads in the papers from 1983). Audrey could use a few hours of friendly banter and Claire's unique blend of confronting issues without undue pressure. (A part of her, pushed to the side and ignored, whispers that with only a little over three days left to her, these might be the last hours she really gets to spend with Claire.)

It doesn't take long for the same two words that fell from Jordan's lips to tilt her world all over again (to serve as a gravestone for the friend Audrey never looked for but valued and cared for anyway).

The Barn.

Audrey hates the words, the images evoked by them, the thought that this strange structure is enough to endanger Nathan and inflict pain on Vince and Dave and prove that Claire Callahan (Audrey's friend, Haven PD's therapist, help to the Troubled) is dead.

"Hush," Claire (not-Claire) says, her hand on Audrey's wrist-and Audrey's blood runs cold. Roslyn and Tommy and Grady and Will and countless women (Nathan, two gunshots to his chest and only a miracle that he is here now). A masked figure raining blows down on her, asking questions that left her lost and adrift without compass or anchor.

(And James? James who was struck down from behind, stabbed in the back, left for dead with a monster still bearing his name. Did this woman, this murderer, murder him? Was he her first victim?)

With thoughts like that weighing her down, turning her bones to cement, with images of how terrified Claire must have been in her final moments, Audrey almost welcomes the blow that sends her reeling down into darkness populated only by ghosts of herself and a beach where her son was both given to her and taken away.

Glass litters the floor. The shards catch the light and sparkle, casting illumination over Lucy's piano-and over Nathan. His hand is the warmth supporting the back of her head, his arm the support that props her upright, his face that is painted over with ragged fear.

"Audrey!" he breathes when he realizes she's awake. "What happened?"

"Claire." Somehow, saying it out loud makes it more real than the headache drumming a tempo through her skull. "Claire's the skinwalker."

No. She said that wrong (the skinwalker is pretending to be Claire; Claire is not the evil monster that treats lives as if they are only clothes on a shopping rack), the truth so terrible that it jumbles and fractures, too heavy for her tongue to speak aloud.

It doesn't matter, though. Words spiral away from her when Nathan pulls her up against him in an awkward hug. His warm breath stutters against her brow. His arms are steady, even as his heart races dangerously fast against her breastbone.

Maybe it's wrong for him to be so openly relieved when he's just learned that Claire is dead (and Audrey remembers when she first met Claire, how she avoided her because she didn't want another mourner at Audrey Parker's end; now, in the worst way, she's gotten her wish: Claire won't be there to note her disappearance, to care that she is gone). But Audrey can't bring herself to be offended by Nathan's single-mindedness.

She lets herself sink into his embrace, reaches out to hold onto him (because as awful as it is, as terrible a person as it makes her, Audrey's relieved, too, to know that Nathan's the one still here to hold her together and anchor her in place).

"We know who she is now," Audrey murmurs into Nathan's collar. "We have to find her before she becomes someone else."

With a deep breath, Nathan pulls back. "I'll put out an APB. But we both know that she has everything she needs to become Arla Cogan again."

"And I only have a few more days to lead her to James." At Nathan's set look, Audrey adds, "That's what she'll be thinking anyway."

Nathan helps her as she stands, one hand unwavering against her spine, the other cupping her elbow. Every nerve in her body is on alert, straining toward him, overwhelmed by his touch, by his nearness, by the raw emotions exposed in his eyes.

But her own eyes must be more guarded because Nathan steps away, lets go, firms with resolve (a gradation as useless to note as to observe that the sun is more sun-like today). He's on task, focused, so determined to save her.

If only she could believe this could last.

There's no sign of Claire, no hint of Arla (or someone else just building a weapon to use against James the way the Guard tried to use Nathan against her), and the hours trickle away. When Audrey gets the call that there's a body down at the high school, all she can think is that it is her last chance.

"You don't have to be here," Nathan tells her. "I can handle this if you want to go after-"

"I miss working with you," she says. With only a little over two days left, she has no time for anything but truth. "And besides, if I only have a couple days left to me, I'd rather spend them with you."

The truth is so much more effective than all her lies (she should have known that, should have learned that lesson from all the obstructive secrets and misleading lies Haven keeps from her; should have remembered that it is Nathan's honesty that has kept her going no matter what the Troubles throw at her) and does more to affect Nathan in a moment than all her months of lying, rewriting every emotion in him, shining outward from him like a beacon.

"Okay," he says softly. From anyone else, a lukewarm response. From Nathan, everything she could wish.

Last case, last chance, last days. It's a mantra Audrey can't escape. It takes all her attention, demands her focus, keeps her skin prickling with the need to do something and fixes her in place lest the wrong footfall send her spiraling into oblivion.

All of that changes, though, when she catches a glimpse of black hair and dark gloves, tattoo marked on pale skin. Jordan McKee, watching Nathan from afar. Audrey spots her once from across the street, twice across from the high school, a third time just outside the station. If the first sight jarred her free of her mental countdown, the next jolts her into action.

"They're targeting Nathan," Audrey tells Dwight. "They're going to blame him for everything that happened."

"I told him to stay away from the Guard. You told him to stay away from the Guard. Vince and Dave told him to stay away from the Guard." Dwight shakes his head. "He didn't, and now this is the result."

"Great," Audrey bites out. "I'm sure that'll be a real comfort to him when they kidnap him and lock him up and torture him for information he doesn't have."

Most of the time, Audrey's not quite sure what to make of Dwight. For all Garland's strange irascibility, he and Audrey had clicked in a way she didn't notice at the time. But Dwight is more of a mystery, a bit aloof, always masked behind a permeable wall he's erected between them. But every once in a while, he looks beyond that wall, and whatever he sees is too close to the truth for her comfort, his eyes far too incisive, his observations troubling.

"Are we still talking about Nathan?" he asks.

Audrey shrinks away. Months, months, later, and still she cannot shake the image of that dark form standing over her while her hands tug uselessly against her restraints. Cannot stop feeling the ache in her jaw and the bruise on her cheek and the gashes in her wrists. Cannot erase the whisper of what she thought was a doomed woman in the next room over, helpless and kind and forever outside of Audrey's reach.

"He doesn't deserve that," she finally says.

Dwight's expression is far too kind. "Neither did you."

Which derails her completely, and later, when she confronts him again, he's too busy with some business with the Teagues, always evading promising any protection for Nathan. Even Dave sidles away without making any guarantees (not that this surprises her), and Duke won't admit that she might not be there to watch out for Nathan herself.

The fact that she is still the only person willing to stand up for Nathan, after everything he's done for this town, is even more depressing than the final days that slip through her fingers like water.

Their last case together. The last time Duke will be pulled into trouble with a capitol T. The last time she'll get to see Nathan and Duke reminisce about their shared past (even if just for a few moments, rife with glares and blame and bygones not quite allowed to be bygones). The last cup of coffee Nathan will bring her. The last chance she has to learn more about Nathan's life and past (to care about exactly how accustomed he is to being shoved to the edges of any and every group). The last opportunities she has to make sure he knows that he means everything to her (an invitation to dance, his usual reluctance to accept, her murmured comment about the shy ones-the pariahs, the geeks, the best ones-just to reassure him that she chooses this, wants this, and a dance that combines her favorite things: a case about the Troubles, investigative work with her partner; and Nathan, alive and safe and sinking into her touch, even leaning closer of his own accord to brush his cheek against hers).

Twenty-four hours left and now, at nearly the end, Audrey chooses to forget the looming deadline. Better to let loose, to relax and do what she wants rather than what's most prudent. Better to spend her final hours storing up memories worth being stolen.

And it's been so long, too long, since she and Nathan have been able to work together. She almost forgot just how good things can turn out when they (and Duke) all come together to work on a case. Robby looks to be in store for as much of a happy ending as anyone in Haven ever gets, Duke's restored to his regular self, and the skinwalker (Arla, the monster, the daughter-in-law, the killer, the wife) seems eager to ensure Audrey has as many hours as are left to her.

For a last day, it's certainly not the worst (though her heart beats longingly, a hollow echo of James, James, James).

"There's still another way," Nathan tells her that night, as if he can sense her resignation. "We'll find it."

She stares up at him, lit on one side by the soft golden warmth of the Gull and on the other by the cloaking silver shadows of moonlight. (She wonders, if they stand here long enough, will she be able to see the flare of the falling meteors reflected in his eyes?)

In this moment, there are a multitude of possibilities, all of them shimmering there like rainbows scattered off the surface of a seemingly placid ocean. If she reaches for them, plays hot fingers through their ephemeral colors, they will vanish, as elusive as a concrete future. But if she remains perfectly still, breathless and poised, they will remain there, too, trapped in an instant of possibility (of choice).

There's an image (oh so real) of them saying good night and parting ways, both off to their separate sleepless night.

There's a mirage (oh so lovely) of Nathan stepping close and cupping her cheek in his hand and bending to press his lips against her own.

There's a second where she thinks of asking him to drive her-not to anywhere in particular, just endlessly driving through dark roads and along winding cliffs, the familiar rumble of the Bronco's engine all that sounds while their silence speaks volumes their mouths have never managed.

There's a glimpse (oh so impossible because it is too much like saying goodbye and Nathan would never allow it) of her taking his hand and leading him upstairs, of her final midnight hours spent teaching him the contours of his body, learning the edges of her own, inventing secrets for just the two of them.

So many possibilities, all of them so close...all of them so far away.

The moment stretches, elongates, then snaps, and all the rainbows disappear (forever).

On her last night in Haven, Audrey walks upstairs alone.

Moments later, Audrey sits at her table with a serial killer and listens to a story of desperation and grief and rage and blame and yet more desperation. She wants to shoot Arla for even daring to say James's name, and she wants to find James and hug him tight and take all his hurt away. (But this is her last night and there is a gun on her and Nathan is still downstairs and so she does nothing.)

Hours later, she walks to a campsite in the middle of nowhere and sits across from her...her jailor? her warden? her escort?...and listens to a warning so casual, so conversational that it throws everything into sharp relief, makes it all so real that it becomes, ironically, surreal. She wants to run. She wants to fight. She wants to weep. She wants to rage. (If she had a lifetime, she would do them all, but she has only these dwindling hours and so she does nothing at all.)

A couple hours past that, and she stands in a barn (an empty space where all her memories go to die; where she will become as blank as the Barn's interior), finally, finally, face to face with her son as he tells her what must be (what she refuses to accept as anything other than) lies. She wants to hug him close while assuring him that her heart beats far too strongly for her to ever hurt him, to ever attack him no matter the provocation. She wants to brush his hair back from that familiar brow, stare into eyes sea-blue and sky-gray, and soothe his fears with a lullaby. (But he's hers and not hers all at once, tantalizingly familiar and startlingly strange, and so she can bring herself to do nothing.)

She stands beside Nathan (hours later? moments? seconds? time passes, or maybe it doesn't pass, in strange ways here at the end of Audrey Parker's life) and recognizes a truth that burns and melts and comforts and hurts all at once. "He's your son," she says (Sarah, Sarah, Sarah who touched Nathan, reached him in a way Audrey couldn't, who wasn't afraid to grab hold of what happiness she could claim).

"Our son," Nathan says, and how can that be the exact right thing to say? (Sarah, who is, was, will be Audrey, who made something shine in Nathan so that when he returned to the present, he looked at her and still knew her, was not surprised by Audrey where Sarah had been, or Sarah where Audrey would be; he looked at her, looks at her, and knows her.)

"Why didn't you tell me?" she can't help asking (and wishes she had more time to learn, to remember next time, that whenever there are secrets in his eyes, it is because she has touched him in some way she can't understand).

Nathan looks away, helpless and defeated. "I know how that conversation would have gone," he says dully (and she's run out of time to convince him beyond a shadow of a doubt that he is the reason her heart beats, that her veins pulse to the tune of Nathan).

She wants to go to him. Wants to claim him as Sarah did. Wants to take his hand and run away with him, far, far away from Troubles and Barns and meteor storms. (But he is good and just and would not go and there is no place where she can escape from herself-her blank self-and so she does nothing.)

Later (who can say how much later, she has given up trying to puzzle it out; what does it matter when the timer has already reached zero?), she chases James into a memory. Nathan tugs her back with sentences that trail away and half-hearted diversions, but it's the beach and here in the Barn, she can remember her dreams of a picnic on a sunny day. Nathan is behind her and in front of her and the sight of Sarah and him, him and Sarah, freezes her in place. Soft touches, savored kisses, slow movements (she was right, so right, in that hotel room with Duke, when she knew that a jacket coming off would set off universes of chain reactions in him, because even the sleeve of her, Sarah's, dress sliding off her shoulder takes long moments, and Nathan, past-Nathan, shudders and folds down over her, reaching out in response to her, Sarah, pulling him in), and Audrey cannot remember this, but she can feel it in every nerve of her body.

Audrey wants that, that moment, that Nathan, that memory. (Sarah got to have him, got to have James, carry him beneath her twinned heart; she got so much that Audrey never will have.) She wants to turn to Nathan and make her own memories with him (but Sarah lost him, and she had to give up her own baby; she had everything and she had it all taken away from her, and Audrey is suddenly sure that none of her other selves have either had so much or had so much stolen from them, and how ironic is it, that the incarnation who was happiest was also the most bereaved?) She wants to sit both Nathan and James down on either side of her and let her echoed heartbeats resolve into one, stronger rhythm in tune with theirs. (But that's all impossible and she's so tired of failing, of losing, over and over again, so she doesn't even try.)

Later still, Audrey chases James out of another memory, Nathan falling behind and vanishing, and watches him smile at Arla, then draw back in revulsion, then throw himself between Audrey and death. She had a son, she has a son, she had a son-bizarrely, all she can think is that she wants a flower so she can pluck the petals away one by one (the Haven-bizarre equivalent of he-loves-me-he-loves-me-not) until only one is left and she'll finally know one way or the other whether the Colorado Kid is alive or dead. She holds him in her arms, and watches his eyes melt from defensive anger to vindicated love (she's seen the same transformation in eyes the same color, the same shape, only with Nathan, she felt nothing at all maternal), and croons a snippet of lullaby (realizing with each note that she and Sarah are alike now: both of them had Nathan for too brief a time and both of them felt James slip away from them). She wants to know why everything she touches dies. She wants to understand how she can be so crushed and devastated and broken by the tiniest speck of pain in James's eyes. (But none of this can be explained or understood or quantified, and so she knows nothing.)

And finally, Audrey cradles her son in her lap and listens to the answer she's been looking for since Nathan told her she would vanish in a blaze of falling stars and Duke told her that her time was too short. And she knows that none of it mattered. All of Nathan's promises and her assurances and Duke's help and Dave's gambit and Arla's murders. All of it redundant. She's failed, over and over and over again, because there is no other way. because she was meant to fail here, too, and now she is conditioned to accept it.

She wants the Troubles to end. She wants Duke to be unburdened and Dwight to be safe and Nathan to feel. She wants Haven to be an actual haven for God's orphans.

But the cost...oh, the cost is far too high to ever pay.

And so, in the end, Audrey does nothing.

On a hilltop in front of a gray Barn, Audrey gives out the goodbyes she's been unconsciously crafting for fifty-one days. Dwight, still hanging on to that eroding cliff, refusing to look beneath him at the long fall. Dave and Vince, old pros at this, knowing her and learning her and giving her up and no wonder they are so closed off, so impossible to faze with mundane confrontations.

And finally, Duke (her heart's already full, already twinned, already beating double time, but there is, sometimes, a murmur that shapes Duke's name).

The consummate survivor, the adept conman, the pirate with a heart of gold. Still offering to fight the odds for her, still trying to lie to them both, still risking his own life to protect her. Everything in this town has both tried to force them together and rip them apart, but none of it could stop her from loving him.

"I'm sorry I won't remember you when I come back-especially Colorado," she says, and kisses him on the cheek (a might-have-been, a could-have-been, if things had been different; if Nathan had not pulled her from her car and squinted at her badge and looked at her as if waiting for something). A smile, a hand over his own steady heartbeat, a last breath of salt and metal and bravery.

And her hand drops to her side. And Duke steps back. And they fall away from each other.

Only one more goodbye left to earn Audrey Parker's eternal end. The hardest one.

Nathan had tried to follow her outside, but she'd spun a fear of the Barn not letting him back in and he'd let her leave him inside (he knows, more than most, what goodbyes look like, and he would have fought to keep her here, not knowing the cost, and even if he knew, being all too willing to pay it, which is why he must never know).

"What's going on?" he asks her when she steps back inside her prison. "Did they have anything to help?"

"No." She says it quietly, but there is nothing but space and silence around them (and James, healing somewhere; and Howard, watching from an aloof distance) and the word echoes with portentous weight.

He knows. He must know. James is gone and there is no ulterior solution (not for him to know) and she is standing in the Barn while meteors crash to the earth and burn.

He knows. He just can't accept. (It's all right, though, because he always hesitates at the threshold; he waits for the second invitation, and when she will not give it-and she won't, not this time-he will let her go.)

"Audrey," he says, so small. So broken. "Please."

Words are useless. Words only hurt or obfuscate or distract.

She's tired of words. If she has to fail at everything else, she wants to succeed in this, at least, this last, most important, most painful goodbye.

Audrey steps into him (remembers him pulling her from her teetering car), frames his face in her hands (remembers that first hug in darkness safe from shadows, that first touch and all the ones that came afterward, too few, a wealth of many), rises on her tiptoes (remembers a stack of articles to make Audrey Parker real and an address to give her answers and a kiss that was meant for his lips but landed on his cheek and still meant everything), and slants her mouth over his (remembers trying to walk away, and knowing she couldn't, and turning back to him, running to him).

He is hurt and desperate and already grieving, but he does not freeze with startlement this time. His arms wrap around her and his face tilts down toward her and he kisses her back, all devotion and faith and steadfastness (and only knowing his death is the alternative, only remembering the joy in his eyes when he realized he could feel again, makes her able to keep hold of her determination to leave him).

He kisses her, his whole body inclined to her, and when her fingers brush along his neck, when her mouth opens beneath his, he shudders. A tremor that eases some quiet insecurity deep within her (this is why she wanted the goodbye inside, after all, because he can feel everything here, and if he lets her go, he will be able to feel everything for the next twenty-seven years, but still he holds on so tightly and trembles at her touch as if nothing at all has changed, as if she is still all he wants to feel for the rest of his life).

But then she steps away. Back. One step, another, his arms falling away, and distance is strange here, he's already so far away. Unreachable.

"I'm not leaving, Parker," he promises. "I'll come with you. I'll stay here with you and James."

Audrey doesn't need to see Howard shaking his head to know that won't work (anything that sounds too good to be true usually is).

"It's all right," she tries, though her tears probably prove the lie. "I'll be with our son and you'll live your life."

"Parker!" He's reaching for her, but Howard's between them, blocking him from advancing across the gulf that stretches between them. "You promised you wouldn't leave me," he cries. "I'm not leaving either. I'll die before I let you go."

"I know," she sobs, and then plays the only trump card she has: "Howard," she says. "I'm ready."

"Parker!"

Too late. Howard takes him outside-a blink and Nathan is gone, leaving Audrey alone in a vast eternity of nothing.

Time stretches as she waits for Howard to come back, for her memories to be taken away, for blessed ignorance to be granted her.

She can't break down, not yet, not ever, because if she does, she will stride to that door and push it open and flee into Nathan's waiting embrace. But if she just stands here within sight of the door, the temptation will grow too strong, so she wanders instead, a wraith not quite departed. She searches for James and finds Sarah instead.

Dave and Vince, young and not nearly so guarded, their cynicism not yet engrained. Dynamite and another desperate plan (she cannot help but wonder how many failed attempts there have been to keep her in Haven). But unlike Nathan, they take their failure mostly in stride, transitioning quickly to farewells.

"James's father," Sarah says, jerking Audrey's wandering attention back (she can still smell the pine and maple syrup that clung to Nathan and rubbed off on her when she tried to do the same; she wonders if Sarah thought of the same smell, here at her end). Sarah's smile is quiet, private, unbearably sweet. "He's not even born yet."

Audrey can't look away from that face, her face, cataloging every inch of her smile and the look in her eyes, comparing it to her own face and heart and soul (and she has so carefully avoided looking into mirrors when Nathan is around, but it doesn't matter, because now, looking at Sarah, she knows exactly what she looks like when her heartbeat is displayed openly across her face).

"How can that be?" Vince asks behind her, but Sarah's not paying any more attention to him than Audrey is.

"Nathan," Sarah whispers, her hand on her belly. "Nathan and James Wuornos."

The names hit like a cannonball, like that dynamite on a delayed timer, and reeling back, Audrey lets the scene disintegrate into the past, leaving her nothing more than a lone island in a sea of white (but she imagines that if she turns to look behind her, she will see a line of reflections stretching into the past, all just slightly different, all unequivocally her).

Except...it's not just that memory that's vanishing. The walls are blurring, the floor melting to static, the roof becoming a jigsaw puzzle with pieces disappearing.

"Howard!" she calls. "Is this supposed to be happening? Howard!"

As if his name is a cue, the fracturing wall flickers with a picture of him, a kaleidoscopic image of the hill outside. Howard standing in front of the door with Nathan confronting him, gun drawn, and Duke, Dwight, Dave and Vince, and Jordan all arrayed behind him (cavalry or ambush?).

"I can't destroy the Barn," Nathan says to Howard, "but what about you?"

In an instant, in an eternity, Audrey watches, nothing more than a prisoner, as Nathan raises his gun, gold flashing at his belt, Duke yelling behind him, Jordan raising her own weapon, already pulling the trigger. Maybe Nathan was bluffing, maybe he wasn't (Audrey doesn't think even he knows), but now, with one, two, three holes ripped into his flesh, his hand is forced.

Audrey's screaming (one hole from a day that was erased, two holes when Arla decided he was expendable, now three gaping wounds, and every time, every time she brings him back, fate retaliates by upping the stakes), and Nathan's falling (Audrey's banging at the shimmering walls), and Nathan's gun goes off, again and again and again and now suddenly it all makes sense because repetition is key. Repetition is everything. Repetition is the name of the game.

She disappears to be rewritten again and again and again.

Nathan dies to be brought back again and again and again.

Duke helps her to the surprise of everyone again and again and again.

The Troubles leave and come back again and again and again, an endless cycle.

Nathan lets go, doesn't hold on, waits for that repeated invitation and fades away if it doesn't come. Again and again and again.

Repetition and cycles and loops and a punishment that may not be and a choice she makes again and again and again.

And then the cycle breaks.

Nathan doesn't let go. Instead, he holds on.

And the world explodes around her in a blaze of falling stars.

A/N: So we come to the end of season 3 - one of my favorite finales of all time and oh so hard to put down in a story! Anyway, as soon as I started thinking about how I wanted to craft 'Allies,' I decided that I wanted Audrey kidnapped at the beginning, taken against her will, and then have an interlude with Nathan; and then at the end, there would be an interlude with Nathan (so much darker than the first) before Audrey would, of her own free will, walk into a form of kidnapping. Don't know if it exactly worked out, but this last chapter did probably turn out to be my favorite.

If any of you are still reading by the end of this lengthy tale, thanks so much and I hope you're enjoying it (and letting slide my creative, and absent-minded, liberties). I look forward to seeing you in the season 4 installment of 'Between The Lines,' hopefully coming somewhat soon-ish.