For your first question: It seems to me that you are trying to publish a request message with a timeout (using the nc.Request). If so, the timeout is managed by the client. Effectively the client publishes the request message and creates a subscription on the reply subject. If the subscription doesn't get any messages within the timeout it will notify you of the timeout condition and unsubscribe from the reply subject.
On your second question - are you using a queue group? A queue group in NATS is a subscription that specifies a queue group name. All subscriptions having the same queue group name are treated specially by the server. The server will select one of the queue group subscriptions to send the message to rotating between them as messages arrive. However the responsibility of the server is simply to deliver the message.
To do what you describe, implement your functionality using request/reply using a timeout and a max number of messages equal to 1. If no responses are received after the timeout your client can then resend the request message after some delay or perform some other type of recovery logic. The reply message should be your 'protocol' to know that the message was handled properly. Note that this gets into the design of your messaging architecture. For example, it is possible for the timeout to trigger after the request recipient received the message and handled it but before the client or server was able to publish the response. In that case the request sender wouldn't be able to tell the difference and would eventually republish. This hints that such type of interactions need to make the requests idempotent to prevent duplicate side effects.
