Fic: Haven/Miracles - Troubles and Miracles - Teen and Up

[tanaquific]

Title: Troubles and Miracles
Fandoms: Haven (TV), Miracles (TV 2003)
Word count: 1235 words
Rating: Teen and up
Contains: References to canon character deaths and canon violence.
Summary: Set between the Haven episodes 3.03 The Farmer and 3.04 Over My Head. Duke receives help from an unexpected source as he struggles to come to terms with his Trouble.
Disclaimer: This story is a transformative work based on the Syfy/Entertainment One/Universal Networks International series Haven and the David Greenwalt Productions/ Spyglass Entertainment/ Touchstone Television series Miracles. It was written for entertainment only; the author does not profit from it.
Author's Note: Written for intoabar and the prompt "Duke Crocker (Haven) walks into a bar and meets... Tommy Ferguson (Miracles)." Although, technically, Duke walks out of the bar.... Thanks to Scribbler (scribblesinink) for the beta.

oOo

The first time Duke saw Tommy, it was at the harbor. The kid was standing opposite the entrance to the dock where the Cape Rouge was moored, on the far side of the harbor road. Duke didn't know it was Tommy, of course. For a moment—before he realized it wasn't the same boy—he even thought it was Connor Nix. Connor had been on his mind a lot the past few days.

Truth was, he wouldn't have even noticed Tommy, except Tommy was staring at him and Duke had a keen sense of when people were staring at him, a prickling of the back of his neck. Cops, bad guys, beautiful women.... But all he saw was a little boy, playing with a baseball and a glove. The kid mouthed something at Duke, and then a truck rumbled past, hiding him from view. When the truck had driven on, the kid was gone.

The second time Duke saw Tommy was outside the grocery store, when he went to pick up a crate of beer he'd special ordered. Tommy nodded at him and Duke paused, opening his mouth to ask, "Do I know you?" Before he could get the words out, a woman barged through the door, her arms full of paper bags. When Duke turned back toward Tommy, he wasn't there any more.

Duke shook his head. Great: on top of everything else, he was now imagining things. Probably a side effect of having barely slept in days. Not even a whole bottle of whiskey was helping much with that.

The third time, Tommy was sitting on the bench at the end of the parking lot at the Grey Gull. Duke spotted him as he came outside to bus tables and straighten chairs. This time, Tommy didn't disappear as Duke strode across to him. "Hey, kid." Duke tried to sound friendly. "Where's your mom?"

Tommy gave him a slow, careful look before he answered. "Arizona."

Duke raised his eyebrows. "That's a long way away." He sat down next to Tommy, taking in the jaundiced cast of the kid's skin and the dark shadows around his eyes. He looked sick. "You got family in Haven?"

Tommy nodded.

Duke glanced around, wondering where they were. The last of the customers had left ten minutes before. He looked back at Tommy. "You gotta name?"

Again, there was that considered pause before the kid answered. "Tommy."

"I'm Duke." Duke held his hand out.

Tommy regarded it for a moment, but didn't take it. He brought his gaze back up to meet Duke's. "I know."

Duke let his hand drop. "Of course you do," he muttered. He held Tommy's gaze. "So, are you stalking me?"

Tommy lifted one shoulder slightly. "More... haunting?" he suggested.

"Hmm." Duke turned and looked out at the boats bobbing up and down on the water. An interesting choice of word. And Tommy was making him nervous—not in the way cops or bad guys or even beautiful women did. More in the way Troubled people often did. He picked at some imaginary lint on his knee. "You got a Trouble, Tommy?"

"Uh-huh." Tommy sat quite still, the way small boys usually didn't.

"You know," Duke turned his head away a little, following the track of a gray gull with his eyes, like he was more interested in that than Tommy, but acutely aware of the boy by his side, "if you've got a Trouble, you'd be better off talking to a fr—to someone I know. Her name's Audrey. She helps people."

"You help people." Tommy sounded quite certain.

Duke laughed wryly, glancing sideways at Tommy. "No, I don't, kid. You don't want my kind of help."

Tommy shook his head. "I'm not here to ask for help. I'm here to give it."

"Really?" Duke turned fully then, regarding Tommy with raised eyebrows. He saw a kid who was maybe ten years old. What kind of Trouble did Tommy have that he could possibly help Duke?

Tommy gave him a faint smile, as if he knew what Duke was thinking. "My Trouble's a bit like yours. I touch people and... whatever's troubling them goes away and they get to live."

Duke didn't think that sounded like his Trouble at all. My Trouble is that I murder people and then their family's Trouble goes away. Oh, and then they're dead.

Tommy was still looking at him, with eyes no ten-year-old kid should have. Eyes that had seen too much. "And it makes me feel bad."

"Right." Duke snorted. That bit he knew all about.

Tommy dropped his gaze, but he went on talking. "My dad used to ask me to help people. My mom didn't want me to, because it made me sick. They argued about it a lot." Well, that explained why Mom was in Arizona and Tommy was here. "But there was something else out there. Something that gave me this." He lifted his hands. "I called it The Darkness, because it was scary. Because it wanted things. But I don't know if it was good or bad. Just that it wanted things. And sometimes what it wanted was for me to do things."

He dropped his hands back into his lap. Duke waited for more, but it didn't come. At last he asked, "Did you do them?"

Tommy shrugged. "Sometimes. Sometimes they were bad things. Sometimes they were... necessary." He glanced up at Duke from under his lashes. "Sometimes I said no."

"What did the... this Darkness do if you said no?" Duke felt silly asking. Felt silly taking this kid and his story seriously. But this was Haven. Weird crap happened pretty much all the time, and his own Trouble would sound equally crazy if he had to explain it to someone.

"Got angry." Tommy shivered. "Hurt me. But it hurt less the more I decided what I was going to do. The more it was my choice. The Darkness doesn't own me. And your Trouble doesn't own you. You're the one who gets to decide if you use it."

Duke looked back out across the water. It didn't feel much like that: not when Dad's ghost was turning up to tell him what he was supposed to do, and Audrey was tricking him in to doing what she wanted. "So—." He turned back to Tommy, intending to ask him how he decided what to do each time this Darkness asked for something, but the bench beside him was empty. He hadn't sensed Tommy get up and walk away; he just wasn't there any more.

"Haunting, huh?" Duke ran his hand over the bare wood next to him and then turned to look up at Audrey's apartment. Tommy was right. His Trouble didn't control him. He didn't feel anything like the kind of compulsion that had apparently driven Harry Nix to do what he'd done. He had a choice. And it had been the right choice to end Nix's Trouble, once and for all—even if the way Audrey had forced that choice on him had been all wrong.

Duke got up from the bench and strode back toward the Gull. He'd find a way to show Audrey that his family's legacy didn't own him—and neither did she. That it was his choice what he did with his Trouble. As he reached the door, he glanced back at the bench. "Thanks, Tommy," he whispered. "Wherever you are now."