Haven, Maine, Friday Fandom time

[betterthanaplan]

Claire showed up at the docks again the morning after the Justice trouble. She gave Duke a stern look when he climbed above decks.

"Don't even think about —"

"Hey," Duke greeted, waving her aboard. "You saved me a trip."

Claire blinked. ". . . Not that I'm objecting, but — you're not dodging me."

"Yeah." Duke reached up to tug on his hair, caught himself, and rubbed the back of his neck instead. "Yesterday I dared a physical representation of justice to murder me. Even I know that's not exactly sane."

Claire hurried aboard. Duke led her into the Sanguine Moon's absurdly tiny living area.

"You want coffee or something?" he offered.

"Sure. I'll take cream. And two sugars. And no booze."

Duke smiled tiredly and nodded. "Coming right up."

He poured two cups, hers doctored, his own black, and settled in at the table across from her. And proceeded to ignore his own coffee entirely as he spent the next couple hours telling her — everything.

He started in Haven. Audrey had told her a lot of it, about the Justice trouble, about Daphne and her watery attacks, about Nix. Claire drilled him on them anyway, stopping him every step of the way to check in on his emotions about it all. Duke didn't even have the energy to bristle over it, or to deny feeling any sort of way. It was heavy, and he needed help. And it felt good to explain it all, his fear and guilt, his uncertainty about whether he could control his trouble, the horror he'd felt when he'd realized that Audrey had lied to get him to use said trouble.

He looked up at Claire then. He spent most of his sessions staring off into space, rather than watch her react to his fucked up brain. "What about her?" he asked. "How'd she feel about all that? Does — does she even realize how messed up that was?"

"Do you think she does?" Claire asked. Duke scowled.

"Don't do that. Don't answer a question with a question. I hate that."

"Why?"

"Claire."

Claire sighed with a faint smirk. "Yeah. I know. But I can't actually tell you how Audrey feels."

Duke nodded. "Right. Fine. Doctor-patient whatever."

"Yes," Claire said. "And I can't tell her how you feel, because of that same doctor-patient whatever. So don't knock it. I also just think that maybe you should ask Audrey if she understands what she did to you."

"Wow," Duke said. "That's — never going to happen."

"I know," Claire said with a deep sigh. "It's really frustrating."

They kept working backwards from there. They touched a bit on the not-troubled man-dog and Duke's extreme reaction when he'd thought he might have been hit with troubled blood ("It wasn't extreme. I had as many as three troubled people around me. Who knew what I would have done?" "You didn't do anything bad to Daphne. You actually saved her life with your trouble." "Yeah, okay, but I didn't know that then."), then talked for a bit about discovering the truth about the Hunter, and how he felt about Audrey potentially going away. ("Like shit. Are you happy?" "Not particularly. I, for one, am going to really miss her when she goes." "If she goes. If.")

Then, finally, they made it to the real elephant in the room.

"How long?"

"How long what?"

"How long was Haven, what did you call it, 'time-locked'?"

". . . Four months."

". . . Oh."

Duke skipped around a lot. Four months was a lot to cover, and he didn't have as firm a grasp of what happened when.

"Wait. So . . . you were a teenager for a weekend?"

"And change, yeah."

"And you spent it in an orgy."

"A threesome."

"And woke up ten."

"No no no, that was — that was later."

"Okay," Claire said finally. "Let me see if I've got this. After you went back to Fandom with Detective Williams and Octavia stopped — being a raccoon — you two were trying to put your relationship back together . . . so you invited in a third person." Duke nodded faintly. "Who is the Devil." Another nod. "And fresh off a couple thousand years in Hell followed by being rejected by the first woman he ever loved."

". . . Yeah, when you put it that way it sounds bad."

"Duke!"

"It made sense at the time!" Duke said. "And — I mean, it still does. Luce and Tavi are — they're the most important people in the world to me. They make each other better, and they make me better, and — you know, getting to wake up in the middle of a hot-person sandwich is basically the best thing ever."

"Wow." Claire nodded. "Right, yeah, there really is no middle ground with you, is there." Her phone chirped, and she glanced down at it. ". . . Are you okay right now?" she asked. "You're not, like, in crisis? About to go out and kill or get yourself killed?"

". . . Might take out a few lobsters for the Gull," Duke said. "But, uh, other than that, no."

Claire nodded. "Okay. Then I need to go. I have another patient who might . . . destroy the town if I don't go talk to them. But we are doing more sessions. You really, desperately need therapy."

"So everyone keeps telling me," Duke said. "Go. Save the town. Audrey could use the break."

Claire paused, giving him a measuring look, then nodded. "I'll see you later, Crocker."

Duke watched her go, then looked at his stone cold coffee. He pulled out his phone, trying Lucifer and Octavia and Portalocity again, more out of habit than anything else. Then he cleaned up the galley and headed out to start his day.

---

It became a regular part of their routine. Claire would come over for coffee, always turning down Duke's offers to make her breakfast, and they'd do their best together to try to untangle the mess that Fandom and Haven had made out of his emotional wellbeing. Claire taught him some tricks, redirects for his small, habitually harmful habits, things like pulling on his hair or shrugging off compliments, and slowly, very slowly, he started to feel more . . . settled. Level. Less like he might fly apart at the seams at any moment and hurt either himself or someone else.

After breakfast, he'd head into town. The farmer's market was in full harvest swing, offering late-season corn, fresh apples, and gourds galore; he swung by most mornings, chatting with the folks he recognized, and picked up something to put in the special of the day at the Gull. Then he'd head to the bar and harass his employees. Do paperwork and try to keep up with all the business of running the place aboveboard, now that he had his clean slate and all.

It felt a bit like he was on some 12 step program, trying to rebuild his life after going cold turkey. Criminals Anonymous. He kept his head down, attended his "meetings" with Claire, and did his best to avoid the drama.

Gloria showed up for lunch maybe a week later. He brightened when he saw her, giving her a broad grin — and then winced when she whacked him on the arm.

"What's the bright idea, kitten? You're stuck in town again without your girl, and I had to hear it from Vince?"

Duke grimaced. "Wait, what does he know?"

"About Octavia? Not much, thank god, but it wasn't hard for me to read between the lines. She disappears, all that nonsense with the Rev happened, and now you're getting beat up by troubles left and right. You had any sense in that beanpole body of yours, you'd have hightailed it back out again weeks ago. So you must be stuck."

". . . Yeah. I, uh. Actually did. Hightail it. You remember that whole spaceship over Haven thing?"

"Nooo, but it's Haven, so I don't doubt it happened."

"Few weeks back, yeah," Duke said. "After that, my friend Danny took me home again."

"The detective." Gloria nodded. "I remember him. Smart kid."

Duke would have loved to see the look on Danny's face if he ever heard Gloria call him a kid.

"Yeah. So I was back in Fandom for a good four months after that. Went out on the water for a vacation with Tavi and Luce, went to bed with them all curled up nice and snug on the Rouge, woke up back here. Maybe a day after I'd left."

Gloria stared at him for a long moment.

". . . You need a drink," Duke guessed.

"Damn right I do. Gin, please."

Duke tapped the bar "Coming right up."

He could kick himself for not going to find her earlier. Talking to Gloria helped easily as much as talking to Claire did, and she became another part of his routine, one that was much more fun. Claire always gave him looks when he tried to drink during their sessions, but Gloria downright encouraged it. She was a firm believer that, while in other places self-medicating with alcohol was ill-advised at best, in Haven during the troubles it was the only way to stay sane. And she didn't turn him down when he offered to cook for her.

"You going to the Teagues' party tonight?" she asked one afternoon.

"Wow," Duke said. "No. What's the occasion?"

Gloria snorted. "It's Halloween, dumbass."

Duke shook his head. "Definitely not, then. I already had a Halloween this year. I am not doing it again."

His phone bleeped with an incoming text. He took a look at it, then set it down with a sigh.

"Apparently I'm doing that again."

"Audrey?" Gloria guessed. Duke looked away. "You got it bad, kiddo." She patted his hand and finished her drink. "Don't do anything I wouldn't do."

He met Audrey by the base of the stairs leading to her apartment, relieved to see her dressed just how she normally would be. "No costume?"

"God, no," she scoffed. "You either?"

"It's something Gloria wouldn't do," Duke said with a smile and a shrug. "And I didn't really feel like turning into a raccoon again."

". . . A raccoon? Again?"

"Long story. Shall we?"

---

The party was classic Teagues: somehow both absurd and over the top, and yet also lackluster. Duke did get to see Claire dressed in a cheerleader's uniform, though, which was fun. And then a teenager had burst in, babbling about someone needing to save her boyfriend, and Duke found himself following Audrey into a haunted house for the evening.

Not even a haunted house, really. The haunted house. The one that had loomed in all of the old ghost stories he'd heard in school. The one that had such a nasty reputation that even he hadn't been willing to go in. Even when he was desperate for somewhere to stay.

Turned out the place was not so much "haunted" as "possessed by a troubled guy who'd spent the last 30 years going not so slowly insane, bent on revenge against Audrey's former self". He could shift around the walls, play with sight and sound, spying on them all with the innumerable mirrors and intercoms scattered throughout the three story building. He'd murdered both teens and nearly taken out Nathan's new girlfriend, a goth chick named Jordan, by the time they managed to hatch a plan and escape.

Then Dwight had tossed in a bomb, and blown the place to smithereens.

They hung around to watch it burn, Duke and Audrey and Claire and Nathan, and Tommy and Jordan and Dwight and the Teagues. The fire department showed, but on Nathan's instructions, let it burn to the ground and just made sure it didn't spread to any surrounding structures or vegetation. Duke wondered what kind of balls you had to have to be a firefighter in a place like Haven. Or maybe it just required a special kind of stupidity.

He leaned into Dwght's space as the last of the timbers fell. "You, uh. Just happen to keep explosive materials in your truck, huh?"

Dwight looked over at him with a faint smirk. "Like you don't have any on your boat?"

Duke shrugged " . . Fair. I did. Used it to blow up a giant polar bear over Christmas, though."

Dwight nodded. Blinked. Looked at Duke. Duke shrugged again, a real smile tugging at his lips.

"Long story."

[NFB, NFI, OOC welcome. Includes a brief summary of the events of Havn 3x06, "Real Estate".]