sicparvasmagna | June 20

It's not like he hasn't thought about him. Nate's pretty sure that he'll think of Sam in one way or another every day for the rest of his life, but the pain is something that's more or less distant now, something he learned how to handle. He doesn't know when it happened but somewhere along the way the ache in his chest dulled and he learned how to think about Sam without wanting to die with him. A lot of that is because of Sully, and Nate doesn't want to think about where he would have ended up if it wasn't for his friend.

That job had gone so impossibly wrong, worse than anything Nate has ever pulled, but it was more than ten years ago and he's moved on. Or he thought he had.

Nate's been researching almost nonstop since he turned up in this city, and he feels like today he's on his way to a breakthrough. If he was back home he'd be back halfway across that desert by now, certain that he was starting to work out exactly where to find the location of the city. He doesn't know what's persuaded him to keep looking even while he's stuck here, but he's been hunting that treasure for twenty years and it's not an easy thing to just let go of.

He's been locked away in a back room of the library surrounded by old books all day and he's parched. He could probably make it home, he thinks, but there's a vending machine on his way and it's all too easy to just stop and get a bottle of water. He's finished half of it in a couple of swallows when suddenly he pauses, the bottle to his lips.

There's no way.

Nate hasn't seen his brother in ten years but there's no mistaking him. There's no way he could possibly be in this city, but Nate is running after him before he even really registers it, the bottle slipping from his fingers to splash across the sidewalk.

"Sam!" he yells, but Sam doesn't stop, breaking into a run himself. Nate follows, racing him around a corner, before he comes skidding to a halt. A little way down the street he can see him, his brother backed up against a wall, but three guards are closing in. Nate blinks, and he recognises the faces, the uniforms, even years later. The scene in front of him is different to the way he remembers it, but he knows how it will end anyway. One of the guards shouts something in Spanish and Nate flinches as Sam puts his hands up behind his head.

"Sam!" he calls again, and this time his brother turns to look at him. Nate meets his eyes for a second and then the shot rings out, and suddenly Nate is in his twenties again, watching his brother die. Sam coughs up blood and staggers once, twice, and Nate lunges forward. The guards have vanished again and that doesn't make any sense but he doesn't care, running forward and skidding painfully to his knees on the pavement.

"Nathan," Sam says, and this time there's no rooftop, no fall. Last time he'd run because his brother was dead and Rafe convinced Nate not to die with him, but this time there's no one to drag him back, no way to turn away from his brother bleeding out on the ground in front of him.

"Shit, Sam, don't." His hands are moving, trying to staunch the blood, but he already knows there's no point. He doesn't know how it's possible but somehow his brother has turned up in this goddamn city only to die on him all over again.

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Nate casts a cautious glance at Sam, feeling the way his heartbeat is growing softer underneath Nate's fingertips, the way the blood seeping from him has started to slow. He's almost dead and Nate is still just sitting here, not doing a damn thing about it.

But Beth is still talking to him, telling him he's been drugged, asking what he's eaten, what he's drank. There's a haze settling over Nate's brain and he fights through it. For a split second, when he blinks his eyes, Sam is gone. There's no blood on the pavement and it's like he was never there, but then Nate blinks again and he's back, his pulse fading.

"What..." he struggles to get out, trying to shake the fog. If he's been drugged it would maybe explain this, make it easier to deal with. But if she's wrong and he lets Sam die...

"I had a bottle of water," he remembers. He remembers it splashing to the ground as he ran. "Then I saw him running, before." Before this, before he got shot and died all over again. But the water had come from a vending machine and it had been sealed. There's no way someone could have snuck something into it when he wasn't looking.

A bottle of water doesn't seem like the type of thing someone would be able to drug and she doesn't know why anyone would want to drug Nate anyway, not here in Darrow. But his pupils are just so big and he's seeing things that aren't really here and Beth realizes with a start that she's frightened. Really frightened. This isn't the kind of fear that comes with walkers, the cold sort of calming fear that had come over her when she had been trying to get out of Grady. This is something else entirely, something bigger than that.

She's afraid for Nate. Afraid what might have been done to him, afraid of what he's seeing. Mostly afraid she won't know what to do in order to stop it.

"Should I call an ambulance for you?" she asks. "If I call one, they're... they're not gonna see your brother either. They're gonna want to take you." She doesn't ask if he's okay with that, she knows he won't be, but she doesn't know what else to do. Feeling helpless isn't something Beth is used to and she doesn't like it. She likes knowing how to help, how to take control, and right now she's lost.

Nate shakes his head firmly when she mentions the ambulance. He doesn't care if he's actually losing his mind in an alley, he's not going in an ambulance. He doesn't need a hospital and he doesn't need people fussing over him. Even if this Sam isn't real, Nate doesn't want to leave him. Not yet.

"Don't," he says, and he doesn't beg her but he doesn't think she'll argue with him. She looks scared and he's sorry for that, sorry that he's causing her this kind of worry after what she's just been through, so he forces himself to breathe.

Slowly, he pushes air in and out of his lungs and when he glances down Sam is gone again. Slowly, whatever had a grip on his mind is loosening, and Nate thinks maybe he can start to breathe again. Sam isn't here. Whatever is happening right now, he knows she's right. It's not real. Sam died ten years ago. He's gone.

"This goddamn city," he says, squeezing his eyes shut for a moment, just in case. Something is setting off alarms in his brain, something is telling him he knows this, he knows the cause, but it's just out of reach. Nate opens his eyes, steadily ignores Sam blinking back into view and meets Beth's eyes. "I think it's magic," he says, and maybe once he would have thought he sounded like an idiot, but not anymore.

No ambulance. No hospital. That makes her nervous, too, but she'll listen to what he wants. Nate isn't stupid and he isn't going to do something that will put other people at risk right here in Darrow, she's sure of that, but she doesn't really know what's happening either. It frightens her to think something might be happening to him that she can't help, something she can't change.

Especially something like this. Watching someone he loves die. Watching someone he would do anything for just disappearing right in front of his eyes. It isn't exactly what happened to her in the park, but it isn't entirely different either. He's seeing something that isn't really there and even if it's real, even if it's something that's happened in the past, it isn't happening now. That doesn't change it, it doesn't make it any less scary, and Beth tries to remember how Nate helped her that day in the park.

He'd let her go somewhere she felt safe. Somewhere they could just be.

"It might be," she agrees, taking Nate's hand gently. "Do you still see him?"

Nate squeezes her hand, glad for the tie to the physical, to something real. If he's losing his mind he's gonna be fucking pissed about it, but he's not convinced that's what's happening. Weird enough shit has happened in this city. Just last week Beth thought she'd been shot in the head. Nate breathes steadily, forces himself to concentrate. The more he focuses on Beth's hand in his, the quicker Sam blinks out of view.

"He comes and goes," Nate tells her honestly. He doesn't want to leave Sam like this but he's almost positive now that it's not Sam, not for real, anyway. This city is full of cruel tricks and Nate will resent the hell out of it later, but for now he just wants control of his own head again.

"He died ten years ago," he tells her. Sam died a long time before Nate showed up in this city and maybe that doesn't mean anything, dead people turn up here all the time, but he's pretty sure Sam isn't supposed to be here. "He's already dead, this isn't real."

If he comes and goes, he can't really be here, that's what Beth decides, but that doesn't make it any less scary or any less real to Nate. She lets him squeeze her hand and then squeezes back, assuring him she's here, she's real. And whether or not his brother is really here doesn't matter, not at the end of it. What matters is what Nate has seen. And not for the first time from the sounds of what he's telling her.

Beth knows what that pain is like. She hadn't seen Shawn die, not the first time, but she had seen her mother, and she'd watched both of them gunned down the second time when they had come out of that barn. She'd watched her father die, too, every last terrible moment of it, right down to that peaceful smile he had given her and Maggie. What Nate is seeing, what he's seen, she knows just how awful it is.

"The pain is real, though," she says. "That's real." And there's no end to it, she's learning that. Things can be good for awhile, for a long time, but there's still pain. "I'm so sorry about your brother, Nate. That's awful, it's an awful thing to have to go through and it's an awful thing to have to see."

June 20 - Open

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