Scheherazade: Part Five

by Alicia McKenzie

She slept peacefully this time. No dreams, or at least none that she remembered. The muted noise of people stirring outside the house as the Oasis moved into its day cycle finally roused her, but she stayed curled up on the bed beside Nathan, watching the curiously uniform light spreading across the room from the window. Franklin had apparently decided to make it a sunny day today. She was really going to have to have a talk with him about this new penchant of his for playing psychological games with the weather.

Nathan was asleep beside her, but restless. Not quite tossing and turning, but he twitched every so often, muscles tensing and untensing as if he were fighting something in his sleep. Domino reached up and laid a hand on his forehead. He was definitely feverish, she thought unhappily and lowered her hand, letting it rest for a moment on his chest, just over his heart. She'd have to go hunt down Ilsa, get her up here to take a look.

A soft, discreet knock came at the door, and Domino sat up carefully, trying not to jar Nathan as she swung her feet over the edge of the bed to the floor. She might as well have not made the effort. His eyes flew open as if she'd just jumped on the bed, and he blinked groggily up at her.

"Shit," she muttered. "Stay put, okay?" Getting up, she headed over to the door. "What the fuck do you want?" she growled as she yanked it open.

"Good morning to you too, sweetheart," Patrick said with a bright smile, utterly ignoring the way she was glowering at him. "I brought breakfast," he said, waggling an earthenware bowl at her.

Domino blinked at it. The fruit in it looked fine. The bread, however, was green. Bright green. "Room service. Wow," she quipped, and took the bowl. "What do you want, Pat?" she said, but stepped aside and let him into the room.

"Just thought I'd check up on you two, see if you needed anything," Patrick said amiably. His eyes moved past her to the bed and narrowed in concern. "Hey, Nate. You look, um, marginally less shitty this morning, I guess."

Turning, Domino scowled as she saw Nathan struggling to sit up. "Here," she growled at Patrick, shoving the bowl back at him and going back to the bed. "What did I tell you about staying put?" she asked harshly, rearranging the pillows to provide at least some support. "Lean back," she instructed, biting her lip at how passively Nathan obeyed her. His face was flushed, and he let out a small noise of pain as he laid back against the pillows.

She could sense Patrick standing behind her, although she hadn't heard him cross the room. The hunter in him, she supposed; he tended to move soundlessly, even here in the Oasis. "He doesn't really look good," he murmured.

Domino looked back over her shoulder and up at him. "Thanks for the newsflash," she snapped.

"Don't bite my head off, beautiful. I'm on your side, remember?"

Despite herself, Domino rolled her eyes, biting back a laugh. "You are the only person around here that I'd let get away with that," she said as dryly as she could manage. "Hell, I wouldn't even let Nate."

"I live only at your sufferance, as usual." Patrick walked around to the other side of the bed and sat down. "Ilsa not been back up here to see him?" he said, checking Nathan's pulse and frowning. "I mean, who the hell knows where that knife had been before that bastard stabbed him with it? Last thing we need is to have Nate laid up fighting some damned infection."

Nathan managed to give Patrick a fair approximation of his usual glare. "Would the two of you quit talking about me as if I weren't here?" he muttered hoarsely, batting Patrick's hand away. "Going to make me paranoid or something."

"You mean it's possible to make you more paranoid?" Patrick asked, giving Nathan a wide-eyed look. Domino nearly laughed again. It was so obviously a front. Patrick didn't do innocent very well.

"Fuck off," Nathan grumbled, his gaze drifting up to the ceiling and lingering there blearily. "Did you break a chair over his head?" he asked after a moment.

"Whose head?" Patrick sounded honestly puzzled this time.

"The one that stabbed me," Nathan said very carefully and pedantically, as if talking to a five year-old who didn't take direction well.

"No," Patrick said, shooting Domino a look that she translated as 'Did Franklin miss some temporal residue while he was at it?' She shrugged, shaking her head a little, and Patrick looked back at Nathan a bit bemusedly. "Why, was I supposed to?"

"Yes," Nathan said almost petulantly, and closed his eyes. "Otherwise I'm going to start thinking you don't love me anymore."

"Well, we can't have that." Patrick looked up at Domino with a grin and visibly relaxing. "I wouldn't want to give either of you that impression."

Patrick was clearly considerably encouraged by the fact that Nathan was bantering with him. Domino wished she could be, but the feel of the link wasn't reassuring. There was a blurriness there that made her think Franklin had indeed been too concerned with closing the stab wound to make sure he scoured every trace of the shift residue from Nathan's mind. What she was feeling was far too familiar.

"Pat, quit making a spectacle of yourself and go find Ilsa for me," she said easily. "See if you can find Franklin, too?"

Patrick rose, nodding. "Will do," he said, his eyes flickering concernedly back to Nathan, who gave him another bleary glare. "I'll be back later, okay?"

"Not going anywhere," Nathan muttered.

Domino looked back over her shoulder to watch Patrick leave the room and close the door quietly behind him. Nathan reached out and grabbed her wrist, his grip surprisingly strong, and she jumped, looking back down at him. "What?" she asked almost defensively.

His eyes were narrowed again, and he seemed to be having a significant amount of difficulty focusing on her face, but he was still managing to look monumentally unimpressed. "Stop acting like you know everything that's going on in my head," he muttered, and let go of her wrist, letting his hand fall back to his side as if it were too much of an effort to hold on.

"I am blessed with this direct link to your brain and all," she murmured dryly. "As well as several years of experience." She knew how to gauge his mood precisely. She'd had to learn. Learn or lose him.

***

There'd been no looking back, after that first wild encounter at the Stonehenge-analogue. They'd slipped right back into the old ways, old habits, as if they'd known each other for years. Truthfully, she'd only remembered that they hadn't when she made a point of reminding herself--or the very few times when he was safely asleep beside her and she could see the claw-mark scars on his throat and chest and abdomen, scars her Nate had never had.

She'd never asked him about them. He'd taken too much care to hide them from her. He' d flinched and turned away the time he'd woken up to find her tracing them with a gentle hand as she tried to visualize how it might have happened. Their budding psi-link had been edged in desolation for days afterwards. She'd been much more careful after that.

Things had been surprisingly good for a while. They'd survived, managed to keep themselves fed and clothed and relatively intact. The sex was great. The conversation was nearly as good. She'd missed having him around to snipe at. Missing having him there beside her when she woke up.

Stolen time, she thought in retrospect. It had been in those few months that the last shred of a pattern in the shifts had disintegrated completely, leaving them wandering in a world where change came in the blink of an eye, where shifts came in packs, as if they were hunting you.

Nathan had been so determined to keep them both alive and together. When it got to the point that he could only do that by manipulating the shifts, he did. It was heartbreaking to remember how carefully he had intervened, how measured an approach he had taken--and how quickly that discipline had started to break down once the shift residue had started to build up in his system.

Knowing nothing about the residue, all she'd had to go on was the evidence of her eyes, the proof that told her the same thing was happening to him that had happened to the other Nathans she'd met in the shifts. His increasing disorientation, the hallucinations, the nonsense he babbled in between periods of near-catatonia--she'd seen the same progression (if much faster) in the other Nathan she'd traveled with, and the end result in several others with whom she'd had passing encounters.

But there was one significant difference between this Nathan and the others, a difference that meant everything. They had attacked her on sight, or turned on her at the first opportunity they got.

He never did. Not only that, but he never even tried. Never even began to try. The psi-link between them had grown strong enough by then that she'd been able to read him, despite the static-like interference that had gotten worse over time. She could sense his thoughts, his emotions, and she'd never sensed anything threatening, never. Her cautious pokes along the link trying to establish that were more often than not greeted by a dizzying wave of pain and guilt, quite obviously provoked by her wariness.

It was, she'd often thought, as if he couldn't even bear contemplating the possibility of hurting her.

And that never changed. Even as his mental state deteriorated and his moods began to swing even more wildly, she never was never afraid of him. All she felt, as he slipped farther into a haze of delirium, farther away from her, was pain.

***

In the end, circumstances simply forced him to act one time too many. They were crossing a rain-swelled, muddy river when shifts tore open on either side of them. and started to advance.

"Nathan!" Domino shouted, grasping the nearest rock and glancing rapidly at the opposite bank. Too far, and the current would carry them into the downstream shift if they tried to swim for it. "Nate!" she shouted again. He was several feet away, floundering towards another rock - he didn't swim well at all -and didn't even look towards her as she called his name.

Panic tore at her. He was so out of it--he hadn't said a word to her in days. If he didn't see them--"The shifts!" she screamed, willing him to hear her over the noise of the water. "NATHAN!"

He looked up, his eyes burning into hers across the space between them. Waves of raw emotion came cascading up the link, despair and fear and a strange, helpless anger.

Then it all winked out like a streetlight at dawn, the link going hollow and empty and so cold that the water around her suddenly felt warm. Nathan closed his eyes, and the world around him shivered, the shockwave a palpable thing as some unimaginable force erupted outwards from him and shattered both shifts as if they were made of glass. The one upstream revealed a momentary glimpse of a starry void as it fell apart, while the one downstream was even worse, nothing but swirling green gases that she knew had to be toxic.

Then they were both gone, and Nathan was slipping beneath the water, not even trying to stay afloat as the water closed over his head.

Domino cried out and started after him, somehow managing to forget just about everything she knew about swimming as she flailed and thrashed through the water. He sank like a stone, and she had to surface twice for air as she searched for him in the nearly opaque water. The third time was the charm, but he was so heavy, so unbelievably heavy. She didn't know how she managed to get him back to the surface, let alone fight the current and drag him to the shore, but she did.

She checked him, once they were safely out of the water, and found out he wasn't breathing. Domino pounded on his chest and breathed into his mouth until he jerked beneath her and started to cough up an astounding amount of water. "It's okay," she said hoarsely, helping him turn on his side. "It's okay--you just passed out or something, you're okay."

Flinching away from her hands, Nathan curled up into a fetal position, shivering violently. "I'm sorry," he rasped in a voice that was barely there. "I'm sorry--I tried, but I didn't know, I didn't see--too late, always too late--"

The waves of guilt washing up the psi-link were so overwhelming that she felt almost nauseous. "Nathan, it's okay," she murmured brokenly, bending over him and laying a hand against the side of his face, willing him to look up at her, to focus on her instead of whatever hallucination had him in its grip this time. "Listen to me, Nate. Just listen to my voice. Look at me, please. Just open your eyes."

He withdrew farther, as if trying to shrink in upon himself and vanish from the face of the world. "It's broken," he almost whimpered, his whole body racked by shuddering. "It's all broken, all falling apart--he's waiting, he'll be free when the center falls--"

More of the usual nonsense. She had no idea what he was talking about, no clue what provoked the fear that was accompanying the guilt now. Maybe it didn't matter, she thought, cradling his head on her lap and trying to blink back tears as she looked around for more shifts. They'd be there, sooner or later. There were never two where there could be four, or six, and they were getting more hostile by the day.

"Turning and turning," Nathan whispered feverishly. "Turning and turning and turning--"

"Stop," she begged him, her voice breaking. She couldn't take this, couldn't bear watching him slip away into madness. She'd just gotten him back, damn it. This wasn't fair. "Damn you," she whispered raggedly, not knowing who she was talking to. She leaned over him, kissing him as desperately as she'd just performed CPR.

It worked sometimes. A touch, a kiss, any kind of physical contact. But as she drew back, he laid there limply in her lap, his eyes fixed dazedly on the iron-gray sky above their heads.

"Can't you hear?" he murmured, his voice much calmer now. It wasn't a good sign. "The world crying."

"No," Domino said roughly, scrubbing at her eyes with the back of her hand. "That's me, idiot."

Nathan gave an exhausted sigh as his eyes fluttered shut. "Not yet," he breathed. "The hour doesn't know its name."

Domino closed his eyes, swallowing a helpless, useless cry of protest. No one was listening anyway. No one cared. If there was a God, He'd abandoned her and Nathan and every other soul still alive and suffering in this broken world. Why should she hold on to any illusions about that?

Pulling herself together, she opened her eyes again and sized up their surroundings. The forest behind them appeared to be rotting away where it stood, and there was no sign that this land had ever been inhabited. Even under the best of circumstances, she wouldn't be able to carry Nathan very far. Trying to drag him through the dead, briar-like undergrowth of the forest would probably be utterly futile.

Not enough options. She shifted Nathan in her lap so that more of her body was in contact with his, but he was so still, so cold. She listened to the shallow rasp of his breathing and tried to ignore the fact that the link was going silent.

"Have I ever told you any of my stories?" she whispered softly, not longer trying to fight back tears. His head fell limply against her chest as she shifted him a little closer, and his eyes fluttered for a moment, but stayed closed. "I don't think I have."

It had been years and years before the shifts had come. The Pack had gone on a bit of an education kick; Nate had gone to Harvard law, Hammer had picked up a couple of engineering degrees as if it was the easiest thing in the world, GW had ignored the general mockery directed at him and studied political science and international relations, and she--well, she'd been the biggest dilettante of them all. None of the possibilities the others had pursued had really interested her.

She'd done some foreign languages, gotten a taste of everything from forensic science to military history to cultural anthropology. Along the way she'd happened to take a couple of courses in folklore and mythology, and liked it. Really liked it. GW and Hammer and Theo had always laughed at her when they caught her reading the Eddas or the Mabinogion or the Ramayana for fun, but she'd seen something in all of it, some fundamental truth that had intrigued her. 'The bones of belief', she'd described it to her Nathan once. He'd never laughed.

She'd always had an eidetic memory, and the shifts hadn't changed that. Her stories, all the bits and pieces of myth and legend and folklore she'd collected in several years of reading the stuff for her own enjoyment, were as clear in her mind now as they'd always been. She clung to them, quite deliberately. The only way anything survived in this world was by being remembered.

"He liked them," Domino whispered, her voice growing hoarsely. "I think you would have, too. I wish--I wish I'd told them to you, Nate."

The sky above was darkening, the clouds rolling in from the west turning almost black. The smell in the air--she knew that smell. Snow, or something like that.

It was the 'something like that' that worried her.

Part of her mind continued to work the problem quite calmly. There was no shelter, as far as she could see. Whenever whatever it was came, she'd try and drag him up to the trees. It wouldn't help if it was acid snow or some such fucking thing, but it would be something.

She just--wasn't leaving him. If it was killing snow or a deadly shift or the four horseman of the fucking Apocalypse, it didn't matter.

She wasn't leaving him. Not again.

"There was one about a spider," she said softly, remembering. "This silly little spider named Anansi--" Before she knew quite what she was doing, the rest of the story came spilling out, and she told him about Anansi collecting wisdom and trying to hide it away where it would be safe, only to be outdone in wisdom by his own son. "So he climbed to the top of the tree," she murmured, "and spilled all the wisdom he'd collected into the wind. It blew in all directions, and that's how wisdom came to the world."

It was getting colder. She should be trying to build a fire, but she knew she wouldn't find any dry wood. Everything was wet. Domino sighed heavily, wrapping her arms around Nathan as tightly as she could. *I'm so tired,* she thought dully. The last of the adrenaline from their near-escape in the water had faded. She wanted to curl up on the ground beside him and go to sleep, but she kept talking. The silence was too much, otherwise.

"Do you know how many different versions of Sleeping Beauty there are?" she asked, shivering. "Sleeping heroes, too. In all kinds of different cultures. King Arthur's a sleeping hero, you know. That's where the whole once and future king idea came from. He's supposed to wake up and come back when his people need him the most--"

She was babbling. She knew she was babbling, but she couldn't stop, because if she did, she was going to start sobbing, and she wouldn't do that. Losing control wasn't an option. If she had nothing else left, she had that.

"Sleeping heroes and lost kingdoms," she murmured. "Like Prester John's. You think if we'd walked for long enough we might have found it, or Shangri-La, or s-something--?"

"Maybe," Nathan whispered in a cracked voice, and Domino nearly jumped out of her skin.

He was looking at her. A little quiver of something -fear or hope, she wasn't sure which - stole her voice for a moment, but she wrestled it under control and took his hand, squeezing it tightly. "Hey," she choked out, her eyes blurring with tears. "Thought you'd checked out on me, babe."

"That'd be--kind of rude, wouldn't it?" He tried to smile, but the muscles on one side of his face were twitching almost spasmodically, and he couldn't seem to quite manage it. The link was vibrating weirdly, as if it were trying to pull itself apart from the inside, and Domino clung to it fiercely. He was coming back. He was coming back, and she wasn't going to let him go.

"You bet your ass it would be," she said vehemently. "Can you get up?" She held her breath, waiting for the answer.

"With some help, maybe," he said weakly. "Just--keep talking to me, Dom."

"I can do that," she said, shaking with relief now as she helped him sit up. "Believe me, I can ramble on with the best of them--you know that, too. You're always telling me I talk too much, remember?" She laughed nervously. "Shit, this is a switch, isn't it?"

He swayed a bit, but she put an arm around his shoulders, keeping him upright. "I like them, too," he whispered tiredly, his head sagging towards his chest for a moment before he straightened.

"What?"

"Your--stories. Tell me more."

***

So she did. There was really nothing else to do, not other choice if she wanted to keep him on his feet and moving. They reached him somehow, in a way that nothing else did, and she wasn't going to look a gift horse in the mouth.

Strangely, he didn't seem to like the Iliad.

It seemed like the stories gave him something to focus on. He would tell her, in his more lucid moments, that it was the sound of her voice as much as anything else. Domino wasn't sure she bought that, and she knew she wasn't imagining his response to certain stories. He didn't like the Iliad. He collapsed on the ground crying when she started in on the myth of the Phoenix.

Others, usually the more humorous folktales, sometimes drew a smile from him, and he would listen with almost fearful concentration to the creation myths she pulled up from the recesses of her memory. She avoided the whole 'end-of-the-world' motif quite deliberately, of course. There were some trains of thought she definitely didn't want to encourage.

She taxed her memory to its utmost, pulling stories out of the recesses of her mind and using them to keep him with her. They crossed wind-swept deserts, and she told him stories. They huddled together for warmth in icy winter-shifts, and she whispered more stories to him as he drifted off to sleep beside her.

And so long as he listened, so long as she could look in his eyes and see some glimmer of comprehension and feel him clinging to the link like a lifeline, she knew there was hope.

It was all she had left to hold onto. There was no end to the shifts, no matter how far they wandered. There were other people around and they still ran into them fairly regularly, but it was never anyone Domino recognized, or anyone who recognized her and Nathan. None of them seemed inclined to talk, let alone join them. She didn't mind. It was better this way, just the two of them. She would tell stories and he would listen, and the two of them would walk through the worlds, seeking something.

Looking for Shangri-La? She didn't delude herself that there was any such goal in their wanderings. It was just her and him, her stories and his madness, and eventually she started to lose herself in one as much as he was lost in the other. Her hold on reality grew tenuous, at best, and she kept thinking about the Arabian Nights. Thinking significant thoughts. She was Scheherazade in a way, wasn't she? Only she was telling her stories for a different reason, to hold off something more complex and terrible than death.

They walked. And she told stories until her voice cracked, and then whispered them along the link, never stopping until he was safely asleep, beginning again as soon as his eyes opened. She told him her stories until the line between them and their tenuous 'reality' was erased, and she started to realize that they were living in a story of their own, moving in the shadowy last moments of an epic she'd never fully understood.

There would be an end, eventually. She began to understand that, even want it. It would be so good to rest. She only wanted to see him reach it first, to know he was at peace, before she herself let go.

When they walked through what looked like just another shift wall into the Oasis, her first thought was that this place was very strange-looking for heaven, and yet entirely too homey-looking for hell.

Nathan collapsed into a boneless heap on the ground, like a felled tree toppling to the ground after years of resisting the woodsman's axe. "It's so quiet," he whispered, raising his head a few inches and then slumping back to the ground as if he'd come to the absolute end of his strength. "The eye of the storm."

She knelt down beside him, her eyes roaming the little world-fragment inside its bubble, taking in the garden, the houses, the unmistakable signs of long-term ocucpation. "Oh, my God," she whispered raggedly, sensing the difference between this and the bone-white desert they'd just exited. Her hands started to tremble. "It's not--it can't be--"

It was solid. It was real.

A moan burst from her and she slumped to the ground beside Nathan, not knowing what she was feeling, not able to interpret the emotions, to process what she was seeing.

"An island," he murmured very softly. Sounding very lucid all of a sudden. "It's an island." He let his breath out on a long sigh, reaching out a hand to her. She took it, squeezed back tightly. "All we had to do was wait and it found us."

Lying here holding his hand wasn't enough. Domino crawled across the couple of steps between him and clung to him, crying softly. Trying to convince herself it wasn't a dream.

And that was how Franklin found them.

***

"Dom," Nathan said a bit uncertainly, still-hazy eyes struggling to focus on her. "Dom--I didn't mean to snap at you."

Domino shook her head, freeing herself from the memories with a physical effort. Those first few days still seemed like a dream. Food, clean clothes, a real bath--and a lucid, reasonably sane Nathan, after he'd survived - if barely - Franklin cleansing years of accumulated temporal residue from his system.

When Franklin had finished, he'd had Nate carried here, to this very bedroom. She'd sat at his bedside for two days, waiting for him to wake up. When he had, he'd smiled at her and made a very bad joke about her having matching dark circles around her eyes now, and she'd burst into tears again. It had been thoroughly embarassing. She'd gotten him back for it later, of course.

"It's okay," she murmured warmly, taking his hand in hers. "If I didn't put up with your more-than-occasional weirdnesses, I'd have been out the door a long time ago."

Nathan gave her a shaky, tired smile that was more than a little on the bitter side. "So what are you saying?" he said hoarsely, relaxing back against the pillows. "You still love me, even when I'm crazy?"

"No," Domino said, and leaned over, her lips brushing his in a light kiss. "I love you," she murmured very softly in his ear, "because you always come back to me."

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