Work Text:
2003
Cal is trying to get some work done, but Nikko is hanging around the elegant offices of the Veritas Foundation generating the kind of atmosphere that can only be produced by an incoming thunderstorm, or a lumbering self-involved teenager who feels he's hard done by.
"Look, man, what is your deal?" says Cal, swinging round from the flat screen monitor with its burden of half-translated ancient glyphs. He doesn't want to get involved with Nikko's issues, but clearly no one's going to get any peace until someone does. "Solomon refuse to take you to the surface of the Sun or something?"
Nikko flops down in the elegant dining chair opposite, all snub-nose and bandanna and sense of grievance. "Nicaragua, actually."
"Oh, he found the pre-Mayan pyramids?" says Cal before he can stop himself. He taps the keyboard, and an aerial image blossoms up on the screen, narrow-waisted and green against the computer-generated blue of the sea. The locations of the pyramids blink up like stars coming out, each bringing with it a gossamer spiral of co-ordinates and dimensions and other data. The proportions of the largest one look remarkably familiar. Antarctica, Cal thinks, half-remembering fever dreams.
"He thinks I'm not ready," says Nikko, resentfully.
"No one's ready for Nicaragua," deadpans Vincent as he passes through with an armful of papers and a got-it-all-under-control half-smile. One of these days Cal is going to learn how to do that smile. That day is not yet.
And Vincent's busy and Maggie's already hit the ground with Solomon and is therefore only available over satellite linkup, and Juliet's job is tutoring Nikko and it's not fair to expect her to babysit him in her spare time as well.
Besides, Cal recognises, this isn't a job for Juliet. She'd be sympathetic. Right now what Nikko needs is the exact opposite of sympathy.
Cal pushes his chair back, and pushes a hand through the short, dark ruffles of his hair. It stands up at the back like a duck's crest. He hasn't really got the hair right yet, though he likes the beard and moustache. They suit him. Even if Vincent did make remarks while he was growing them, and Maggie took every opportunity to tell him how well they were coming along.
He props his feet on the table. Nikko, who usually considers the priceless antique table his particular footrest, looks up and pays attention.
"You're being a brat," says Cal. He doesn't say it in the usual exasperated way, he says it like it's a fact, which it is. "You're not the only one to grow up without a mother, and you're not the only one whose father isn't there much. You should be grateful Solomon cares that much about you."
Nikko rearranges his muscular shoulders against the back of the chair. Cal is tall and has that bony ranginess that comes from his muscles not quite having caught up with his bones, even at the age of twenty-five: Nikko is sixteen, and is going to be enormous. "Juliet already told me I should be a good little boy and not make trouble."
"Juliet takes more trouble with you than you're worth," Cal growls, and scrapes back through his mind to the things he doesn't think about.
He remembers the time before he answered to the name on his doctorates. There is a broad cold Maine sky, and a chill that pinches at the fingers and cheeks on the icy way from the dock to the liquor store, and a boat on the water. There is the presence of a man with bone structure like a Mayan carving and the knowledge of death in his eyes.
Cal meets Nikko's eyes. "Listen. I'm not telling you this for your own good or to get you off my back. Well, yeah, I am, but I'm also telling you because it's true. You should be grateful Solomon gives a damn about you, even if the way he shows it looks close enough to pushing you away that you can't see the difference. He wants the best for you. All my father ever wanted came out of the bottom of a bottle."
Nikko starts fiddling around with a Hacky Sack rather than look at Cal. Cal continues, more gently.
"I never knew how long he'd be away and I never knew when he'd be back and if you make jokes about this, Nikko, I genuinely will kill you, but when he did come home he usually looked like he'd gone three rounds with a wendigo and he was covered in blood."
Nikko says nothing for a while. It's not quite a long enough while that Cal goes back to looking at the pyramids or fiddles with the keyboard trying to pick up a satellite connection with Maggie, but it's getting there.
"My father comes home bruised and covered in blood too," he mutters finally, in a voice that's had the fight taken out of it.
Cal zooms in on an area of the coast on the map, marked with pyramids like studs on a painted leather jacket. "Yeah," he says, sounding just as weary as Nikko does, "but generally it's his own blood, is the difference."
2010
Audrey's tried doing subtle and it generally doesn't work, so instead she just slaps down the photographs under Duke's nose. He's lifting crates at the time and stacking them on the deck of the Cape Rouge, and he raises both eyebrows at her like she's been rude.
Audrey ignores that, because it's just vintage Duke and she's going to have to wait through the everything's-all-right-here grin and the hurt expression and the several different kinds of hopeful bullshit before he steers himself round to the truth.
She points at the photograph, and at the transcripts, lying on top of the crate. They look entirely out of place there. "Who are you?" she says. "Indiana Jones?"
"Now don't you get annoyed when people keep asking you that question?" Duke breaks out the expected smile, and reaches out to flip her nose with his finger. She bats it away with FBI-trained reflexes. "Without the Indiana Jones bit, obviously."
A lesser practitioner of the art of annoying Audrey Parker would have made a remark about bullwhips. Duke just widens the smile to the point of positive helpfulness, and she can see he's thinking it.
"You have… three advanced degrees under a false name," she says, jabbing a finger at the documents on the crate. "And that is a photo of you in evening dress at a party at the Uffizi Museum."
"Yes, yes it is." Duke gives it a cursory look. He doesn't seem to find it all that interesting. Audrey does, she has to admit: she keeps looking at that picture of a younger Duke, cocky-looking and smooth-skinned and with shorter hair, and wondering how he got from there to here. And she would have bet money that he didn't even own a penguin suit, let alone the shoes to go with it. He'd be more likely to dress up as an actual penguin.
"I went away," Duke says finally. "I came back."
"You went away. You came back. In the meantime, you worked for a foundation that investigates…"
Duke gets into fights a lot, and Audrey's been there often enough that she recognises the point where his muscles shift and he produces yet another iteration of that charming smile and he changes course, whether it's talking or grabbing a shotgun or, on one particularly memorable occasion, kicking an open crate full of fish into his opponent's face.
He does that now. The changing tack thing, not the fish thing. Which tells her something: as far as she's concerned this is an investigation, but as far as he's concerned it's a fight.
He spreads his hands. "Cards on the table?"
"That depends on how many aces you have up your sleeve."
"I had father issues. Ask Nathan."
Ask Nathan is either a really clever bluff or Duke telling the honest truth, and Audrey can't tell which yet. She leans her hip against a pile of crates. The cold wind ruffles her hair. "I'm listening."
"I had father issues and I had - Haven issues. And I got a scholarship."
"You got a scholarship," Audrey repeats back at him, dryly. "And in all the time since you got back, you never thought to hang up a Princeton banner at the Gull or go to a college game?"
"Bad for business. You see them?" The wide wave of Duke's arm encompasses a bunch of hard-bitten elderly fishermen sitting about shooting the breeze and smoking small rollups on the dock. "Yale men, every one. Except for One-Legged Hiram Brown, he went to – well, Brown, obviously."
Audrey wishes Nathan was here. He wouldn't be any particular help except in keeping Duke off-balance, but at least she'd have a chance of reading in the small crinkles around his eyes whether there actually was a resident of Haven by the name of One-Legged Hiram Brown.
Duke sits down on the nearest pile of crates, props one foot on the opposite knee and starts examining the bottom of his deck shoe; and then he looks up at her, brown eyes like pinpoints of sincerity, which might mean absolutely anything.
"I wanted to get as far away from Haven and everything that was part of Haven or even reminded me of Haven as possible. My roommate, first semester, was a guy from Boston called Calvin Banks. He couldn't take it and his girlfriend had just got some kind of job in an all-expenses-paid resort in Mexico and she'd found him something there too, so – "
"You bought his identity?"
Duke looks insulted. "I played cards with him for his identity. Some of the time he used mine, which is, by the way, the most likely reason why I was refused entry to Mexico that time, and – "
"Nothing to do with you being a smuggler, then," says Audrey dryly.
"A smuggler's just a charitable foundation without the funding."
"You know this from experience?"
"I was telling you my life story, you want to listen?"
Audrey hides a smile. "I'm listening."
Duke looks as if his amour propre has been restored, which, again, could mean anything. "So. Princeton. Most of the classes, I could do in my sleep, but there was one professor – Dr Solomon Zond – well, I looked up to him. As I say…" He spreads his hands. "Father issues. And after I graduated, it turned out he was involved with this foundation trying to prevent the end of the world…"
Audrey feels her eyebrows trying to climb towards her hairline. "What, you mean like some kind of fundamentalist…"
"No, no. Not that kind of trying to prevent the end of the world. Besides, I think Dr Zond was Episcopalian, but Vincent was a Buddhist, and… Different story."
Audrey's eyebrows are past her hairline and trying to make a break for the top of her head. "That's where you picked up your particular form of Buddhism? I bet this Vincent got into fights a lot."
Duke makes a little balancing gesture. "He ended fights a lot. Still does, as far as I know."
"And so, you tried to con them and they kicked you out?"
Duke looks genuinely hurt, as far as Audrey can tell. "No. I told you, we were trying to prevent the end of the world. I've been to Antarctica and Egypt and Tibet." He slaps the nearest metal outcropping of the Cape Rouge. "Sometimes I think the reason I travel around on this, is to try to offset the carbon footprint of the private jet."
"You had a private jet?"
"It's not like they let me fly it. Not more than once." That would usually have been the occasion for another wolfish flash of a smile, but there isn't one here. "Solomon was convinced the world was going to end in 2012. And then he worked out where it was going to end. And I went undercover. So did he – he's been hiding out in a cabin in the woods the last few months, with one of his waifs and strays who I think might be a Russian called Aleksey with a surprising gift for languages. He's saying it's his son, but that kid's ten years too young and doesn't block out the sun when he walks by, so it's not Nikko."
"Wait." Audrey tries to blink back the Duke-induced headache. If Nathan was here and not giving a presentation about gun safety back at the station, he'd have given her some coffee by now. "You're saying the world's going to end."
Duke looks around the bay, with a kind of rueful affection that darkens as he looks towards the lighthouse.
"I'm saying the world's going to end. Here."