sicparvasmagna | debut

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debut - beth

When he swallows, it feels like some kind of monster is tearing at his throat, shredding his insides apart. His tongue is thick and useless in his mouth, begging for water that hasn’t come in days. Or he thinks it’s been days. Surely. The plane had crashed and he’d gone rummaging through the wreckage without finding much of anything useful, which just about sums his life up to a T, Nate thinks. Now he’s been wandering the desert since, his feet dragging along the sand even when he thinks he’s seconds away from dying.
He can’t die. Not yet. Sully is waiting for him to come to the rescue, or he damn well better be. Sully, whom he blames every mess he’s been in since he was fifteen on. Sully, the only person in the world who ever gave a damn enough to look out for him.

He has to keep going. Giving in isn’t an option, dying isn’t an option, so the only thing left to him is to keep dragging his sorry ass through the desert.

He thinks it’s been days, but at this point it could have been weeks and Nate couldn’t tell. He can’t tell left from right anymore, can’t tell the dunes apart, can’t see his own footprints in the moving sand. It’s how he ends up back at the well, time and time again, and he thinks he’s going to scream with the injustice of it, only that would hurt his throat more. His eyes have been messing with him since the second or third (who knows anymore?) day, and he’s stopped trusting them. The mirages are cruel, palm trees and ponds and fucking hula girls, probably, Nate doesn’t know anymore. The worst ones are of Sully, the times that he thinks he’s found him against all the odds.

“Get up kid,” he says gruffly, and Nate cracks an eye open from where he’s lying in the sand and tries to tell himself it’s not real.

“We haven’t got time for this, Nate.” More insistent now. Still not real.

“Swear to god, I’ll kick your goddamn ass myself if you don’t move.”

Nate forces himself to sit, to look up. That’s his Sully, the words ringing in his ears as familiar as they have been almost every day of his life for the last twenty years. Sully. He stretches out a hand, reaching for the one offered to him, and his own hand falls through Sully’s like smoke as he disappears. Hell.

Another night and day pass, alternating between obliterating heat and freezing cold, and when Nate comes across that goddamn well again he falls to his knees. He’s been circling forever, he’s never going to get anywhere, he’s going to die in the middle of the desert and Sully will be so disappointed, Elena will cry for him (he hopes) and Marlowe will destroy the world.

The well crumbles underneath his hands and he looks up. He’s not in the desert. He could cry out of sheer relief but he’s Nathan Drake and he will not cry. For a moment he thinks it’s another mirage, all encompassing this time but not real regardless, but the ground feels real beneath his knees. There’s a piece of gravel digging into his skin which he’s pretty sure wouldn’t happen if this was a perfect dream.
Slowly, he gets to his feet, painfully aware of every ache and protest in his body but refusing to give in to it. Around him is a city, very different to the one he left last he’d seen civilisation, but a generic city all the same. A city which, he’s hopeful, has water somewhere.

His first steps are a little awkward, stumbling and embarrassing, but at least there’s no more sliding sand beneath his feet.

“Alright, Drake,” he mutters to himself, brushing a hand through his hair and feeling sand go everywhere. Lovely. “You can do this. Baby steps. First thing: have you lost your goddamn mind?”

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He looks just awful.

People who pass him throw careful glances in his direction and then skirt on by or they just ignore him entirely, which Beth doesn't understand, not even one bit. It's rude and it's un-Christian and she knows not everyone follows God or believes in that sort of thing, but it wouldn't kill them to be a little nice now and then. When people come here they need help, not to be ignored, and this man in particular looks like he needs more than just a friendly face and someone to guide him to his welcome package and his new apartment. He's covered in sand and he looks like he needs a lot of water, so she's already digging into her bag for the reusable bottle she carries when she busks in the park. Singing is thirty work, she always has water with her, and now she's glad for it.

"Excuse me," she says when she's close enough to him to watch the sand go flying from his hair. "Hey, you're not crazy. I mean, you're probably gonna think you're crazy for a little while, but I swear you're not."

She shifts her guitar case from one hand to the other, then tugs the pink bottle out of her bag and holds it toward him. "You look like you could use this."

Nate is pretty used to people handing him the short end of the stick, but he can't deny he feels a little bitter about this city already. He doesn't know where he is or how he got here or who any of these people are, but he does know he resents the hell out of the way they're blatantly ignoring him. He feels half-dead, stumbling around and begging for water, but no one wants to give him the time of day.

At least they're not shooting at him, though. That's a nice change.

"Thanks for nothing, asshole," he mutters as another person turns away from him with an odd look. Apparently people can be dicks in all cities, something Nate was already pretty sure of but can now confirm.

He turns to try the park, hoping for a public water fountain or even a small depression in the ground with dirty water, he's not picky at this point. And then there's a girl calling to him and holding out a pink water bottle that Nate considers the holy grail.

"Thank you, thank you," he blurts in a rush, and he takes it without asking twice and downs half of it in one swallow. He's probably meant to sip it, he's sure he's heard that somewhere, but to hell with it. If he was in a different state of mind he might feel guilty for getting blood and sand stained hands all over her bottle, but right now he couldn't care less.

Once he's drank enough that he feels like he might be human again, he stops and takes note. She was telling him he's not crazy, but in a weird kind of way that suggests this isn't going to be a pleasant pit stop on the way to Ubar. It never is.

"What was that about being crazy? People don't normally tell me I'm not."

Beth winces a little when he drinks the water so quickly, hoping it doesn't make him sick. She's not worried about her water bottle or the water itself, she's just sort of worried about him, because arriving in Darrow is hard enough without being physically ill on top of it. For just a second, she watches him, her brow furrowed as she waits to see if he'll be sick because he's had too much water too quickly, but he seems to recover well enough and when he asks her to repeat herself, she smiles a little and shakes her head.

"Not crazy," she promises and he seems like he's normal enough, so she doesn't take a step back, but she doesn't step any closer either. Just because he doesn't seem like a bad guy doesn't mean he's not and she's long since learned her lesson when it comes to people she doesn't know. Darrow is generally safe, a lot safer than Georgia used to be, but she's still careful and she's got her knife in her bag, but she really doesn't think she'll need it.

"You're in a city called Darrow," she says. "You just sorta... showed up here, right? Poof, outta nowhere? That's how it happens to a lot of us. I was..." She doesn't like this story, she doesn't tell it much, but she forces a smile and continues. "I was just out on a street lookin' for a friend of mine. Then suddenly there was a car comin' right at me and then I was here instead."

There's a moment where his stomach churns and Nate chastises himself inwardly, but then it settles and he breathes out in relief. The last thing he wants to do is throw up all over the nice girl who gave him water, that wouldn't be his finest moment.

She's watching him like she's waiting for him to flip out, and maybe that's a fair assessment. The things she's saying sound like gibberish to Nate. It also seems like this is absolutely not where he wants to be. Random city stealing people from their day to day lives? Typical, he thinks, but also not cool. He needs to find Sully, he hasn't got time to mess around in a weird people-snatching city.

"Right," he says, drawing the word out carefully while he thinks. "I was looking for a friend, too. Which is why I can't really stick around." He pauses, takes in the park around them which, to be fair, is quite nice. "Not that this isn't pretty and all, but I kinda got places to be, world to save, so." He shrugs apologetically and hands the water bottle back to her.

Beth takes the bottle when he hands it back to her and she watches him for a moment before deciding to just push on. He's going to find out one way or another that he can't get out of Darrow and she doesn't like being the bearer of bad news, but it's probably better he find out from her than someone who's not going to be so nice about it or someone who's going to give him a hard time because he's not from here.

"You can't leave," she says gently. "I know it sounds crazy, but this place sorta just... it just takes people and it doesn't let them leave." Sometimes it does, but once she gets into all that, the rules of this place end up seeming weird and complicated and she knows it's best to keep things simple for someone who's only just arrived. "You can head out toward the edges of the city and once you get there, you just get turned back around somehow and you'll find yourself walking back down the streets toward downtown."

She's tried it. She hadn't really wanted to leave, not when it was safe and free of walkers, but she's curious by nature and she'd had to try.

"This is probably about the time you start thinkin' I'm the crazy one, but I swear, I'm not either," she says. "There's gonna be a package waiting for you at the train station. Same as there was for me and everyone else. It'll have your name on it and it'll have money for you and a phone, but the phone'll only work within the city."

Nate has spent most of his life looking for lost treasure and mythical cities. He's watched people turned into zombies from touching treasure, watched tree sap turn a man practically invincible, watched literally every impossible thing become possible, and he still gives her the side-eye.

Trapped in a magic city is exactly his luck. "Oh great, because when I get magically kidnapped by a sentient city the first thing I want is a new cell phone." He wants to call her crazy, but it's hard to think anyone is crazy after the things Nate has seen. If he'd told half of what he'd seen, someone would have put him away by now.

"So everyone's just... stuck here?" If it's true, he's sure there must be people worse off than him, but he's still mad about it. He was on the verge of finding Ubar, and more than that, he needs to find Sully. And Elena is waiting for him, as much as Elena ever does. "What about their lives?"

"I don't know," Beth says, unwilling to give him false hope. "People have got ideas about what happens after we end up here and sometimes other people show up and the timelines don't make sense, so it seems like some other version of us stays back there, too, but no one knows for sure."

They can say it all they want, they can make promises and claim they know the truth, but no one understands this place completely. Certain things are true -- that he can't leave, that his welcome package will be waiting for him -- but nothing else seems to be a hard and fast rule. All Beth cares about is that there aren't any walkers here and until the day they are, Darrow will be far superior to the place she left. That isn't true for everyone, though, and she knows it.

"I'm sorry," she says. "I wish I could give you somethin' more than that, it's just..." She trails off and shakes her head. She doesn't like lying, not even to strangers, especially not to people who've only just come here. "You're takin' it pretty well otherwise, though. I'm gonna guess you've seen some pretty strange things, huh?"

A magical city hadn't seemed so weird to her after zombies.

Well. That's comforting. Or at least, he thinks it might be. At least that means maybe there's an alternate Nate who has gone on to find Sully. It's not good enough, though. He has no way of controlling the situation from here, and while Nate might not be great at controlling any sort of situation, he still has to try.

"They have my friend," he says again, as though repeating it will make her understand the importance of it. Sully is all Nate has had in the world for 20 years, and he's not about to let that go now. "I have to get back."

She said that if he walks to the end of the city he'll just get turned back around again, but he already knows he's going to try it anyway. As soon as he's sat down for like five minutes. He shakes his head as the dizziness threatens to encroach again, and vows he'll never go wandering aimlessly in the desert again.

"Strange things," he laughs, and maybe the reason he can take this so well is because he's borderline delirious, but that's something he can deal with later. "You could say that."

"Yeah," she says. "Me too."

That Darrow is filled with strange things, too, is something he'll learn and she knows she needs to tell him that, but she thinks maybe it's best to let him digest things bit by bit. He still looks awful, like he's spent weeks wandering around outside and when he shakes his head, Beth shoves her water bottle back into her bag and then reaches out without thinking, catching his fingers with hers. She's always been this way, always the one reaching out for people, the kid on the playground who took others by the hand and led them around until they were welcomed into the group of other children. There are times when she realizes she should know better, times like this, but she moves without thought and then it's too late.

"Come sit down," she says, tugging at him gently. "There's a bench right here and you look like you need a rest. You can have more water and I've got a granola bar in my bag." He needs to get some strength back before he does anything else and maybe once he eats something, he'll be willing to let her take him to the train station. Even with the welcome package, she's sure he'll try to leave, probably more than once, and she's come to expect that as part of the arrival.

"I'm Beth," she tells him. "Who's got your friend?"

It's the kind of thing Elena would have done, he notes in a daze. She always seemed to have one eye on him, ready to catch him if he tripped or staggered, and he feels a dull ache of regret at the idea that he might not see her again. She'd been wearing her wedding ring, that's the thing that's going to stick with him. She could talk all she liked about how it helped in that part of the world, he wasn't fooled. It makes it all the worse that he's convinced he's lost his own ring.

He goes with her gratefully, following her over to the bench and letting his exhausted legs rest. He hadn't realised how useless his limbs were becoming until he stopped moving. "Drake," he tells her when she introduces herself, realising that he hasn't yet. "Nathan Drake. I was in the desert," he says stupidly, feeling like he needs to explain for some reason. He's not normally this dependent, this ridiculous, and he feels like she should know.

He runs a hand through his hair again, scrubbing at the sand and dirt and grimaces. "Marlowe has him," he spits out, like the name tastes bad on his tongue. He's so sick of Katherine Marlowe he could scream. "She's using him, she'll kill him when she's done if I don't find him."

Once they're seated, Beth puts down her guitar case and then goes back into her bag, putting the water bottle and the granola bar on the bench between them. She doesn't know who Marlowe is or what she would be using Nathan's friend for or why she would kill him at the end of it all, but she trusts what he's saying. There's no reason not to. He's not trying to hurt her or steal from her, not that she'd let him if he did, but he seems like a nice guy, genuinely worried about his friend. She wishes she could give him something more, tell him how to get back or at least be able to give him some way to know for sure his friend is safe.

But she can't. He'll have to learn to live with it the same way she lives with never knowing of her family is safe. With never knowing if Maggie and Glenn are both still alive, if Carol and Tyreese have made it. They all have to learn to live with this, but she still wishes she could give him something more.

"Your friend, is he smart?" she asks. "Strong?" He's talking about having been in the desert, trying to rescue someone, she's got a feeling his life isn't quite normal by most standards. That probably means his friend is like that, too, the sort to rescue someone when they need it, and people like that are usually a lot better at rescuing themselves than others realize.

Sully is the smartest man Nate knows, but that doesn't mean he doesn't need his help. He'll deny it until his last breath but maybe Elena was right, maybe he shouldn't still be dragging Sully around the world with him. He was older than Nate is now when he met him 20 years ago, and he's still gallivanting around after treasure because Nate doesn't know how to say no.

"He's smart," he says, nodding. Sully taught him everything he knew, and Nate doesn't like to think about where he'd be without him. "But he's getting on, y'know?" he says it on a laugh, a little awkward. Sully still has more life in him than some teenagers Nate knows, but he can't deny that it must be starting to take its toll. "He's the only father I know." That's maybe a little more personal than he wanted to get, but he needs to explain, and maybe he's still a little dazed.

Beth smiles a little when he says that, though it's sad and she's thinking of her own father, how smart he was, how strong and good and kind, and how none of that had helped him in the end. Even after everything he had done for everyone, even though he'd tried so hard to help people, even though he believed in the good in everyone, the Governor had still taken him without a thought. Sometimes people don't get to survive, no matter how good or strong they are, no matter how smart they are, no matter how many people love them. Sometimes the good ones, sometimes family, they just die.

She isn't going to say that, though, not when he's just arrived here and trying to deal with the fact that he can't get home and help his friend.

"Old guys are even tougher than we think," she says, nudging the granola bar toward him. "My dad lost his leg after the end of the world. No doctors, no nothin', but it had to happen and for awhile we thought he might die. Even after he got through, it... it was scary. The world I come from, it's hard, and he was missin' a leg, but he didn't let that stop him. Old guys... they surprise us."

"Yeah," he says, breathing out a sigh of relief that he didn't realise he was holding. What she's saying is true, and something he should have known already. Sully has gotten himself out of worse jams than this, has always been able to find his way back to Nate. They've dealt with worse than Marlowe, Nate tells himself firmly. This is just a small roadblock.

"The end of the world?" he echoes, realising what she'd said. It sounds like hyperbole, but he's intrigued anyway. "What happened?"

The world I come from, she says, like they don't all come from the same one. Nate has seen cities that were supposed to be lost, were supposed to be myth, but they were all the same world, at least.

He's taking Darrow in stride so far, but she still wonders if he's going to look at her like she's crazy when she tells him what happened to her world. For the most part she tries not to let it bother her, but given what she's been through, the horrors she's seen, all the people she's lost, it still stings when someone doesn't believe her. It isn't fiction, she lost almost all her family to what happened; her mother and Shawn, then Otis and Patricia, then her boyfriends, then Lori and Andrea and Dale. Then finally her father. One by one, the end of the world stole the people she loved the most.

"So far as we know there was a virus," she tells him, looking down at her knee and picking at a hole in her jeans. Then she looks back up and shrugs one shoulder smoothly. "When people died, it reanimated them. Zombies, y'know, though we didn't really use that word often. I think it upset most people too much to think about their family like that, so we called 'em other stuff. Walkers, roamers, I heard some people calling 'em biters once, which I guess was pretty fitting, too. After the dead started walkin', everything else pretty much just fell apart."

Nate doesn't think she's crazy. If he did, he'd have to commit himself right along with her. Fucking zombies, he's not even surprised anymore. He'd told Sully that if he had to fight any more goddamn zombies then he was getting the hell out of the game, but that had been mostly hyperbole and also it hadn't happened again. Once was more than enough, he can't imagine a whole world riddled with them.

"I'm sorry," he starts, because he thinks that's the kind of thing he's supposed to say. Nate was never good with that kind of thing, but he does get it. "I fought a bunch of zombies once." He shrugs. "Nazi zombies. So cliche."

He doesn't seem to think she's crazy, which is pretty nice and Beth smiles over at him, though the smile doesn't last long. A second later she's blinking at what he's just said, her lips parted in surprise and then, without giving much thought, a soft little laugh escapes her.

"I'm sorry," she says, pressing her fingers to her lips. "I'm sorry, I'm not laughin' at you, it's just... Nazi zombies. All the things I saw, all the crazy stuff, all the walkers with half their faces fallin' off, I never once saw a Nazi zombie and now I feel like I kinda got cheated."

She laughs again, then calms herself and sighs softly. "So you saw zombies, too? Not the whole world overrun by 'em, though?"

He likes that she appreciates the ridiculousness of the situation. Seriously, of all things to be resurrected in zombified form, they had to pick Nazis? Nate had been less than impressed. Though, on the scale of things he can deal with vs things that can Get The Hell Away From Him, he has to admit that Nazi zombies had been below those terrifying blue guardian things.

Ugh.

"Just a U-boat," he says, grinning back at her. "And like, El Dorado. But that turned out to be a statue and not a place, go figure."

"El Dorado? Like... the mythical city of gold? Except you said it's not a city, it's a statue, but... it was made out of gold?" She'd seen the movie when she was a kid, the cartoon with the two guys, and she had loved it so much, but what Nate is telling her if something else entirely. He's saying it's real, he's saying it's something that actually exists in the world, and her eyes go a little wide as she tries to take that in.

Nazi zombies are somehow easier to believe.

"How'd you even find that?" she asks. "Is that what you were doin' before you came here?" It seems so far from anything she's ever done. Maybe their world had changed, maybe it had been overrun with walkers, but it sounds like he does all sorts of crazy things she'd never even be able to imagine.

"Yeah, that's the one!" He'd been so excited about it back then, but it seems like an age ago now. The zombies will live, so to speak, forever in his memory, but El Dorado itself had been another let down. Let down is the wrong word, he supposes. But he had walked away with nothing yet again, which is becoming a recurring theme in Nate's life.

There'd been Elena. Okay, maybe not nothing.

"That was a few years ago. This time I was looking for the Lost City of Ubar," he says with a grin. He doesn't expect her to believe him, which is why it's easy to tell the truth. It doesn't seem to matter here, anyway. "It's kind of what I do. Treasure hunting, fighting zombies. Y'know."

"Jeez," Beth says, sounding impressed. "You've done everything." It seems like maybe some of these things are impossible, but she's seen impossible. She's seen her mother rise from the dead and try to kill her, she'd felt her dead fingers curling in her hair and smelled her rotten breath as she'd tried to sink her teeth into Beth's cheek. She knows impossible.

Lost cities, those aren't impossible.

"You're gonna have to tell me all about it, you know that, right?" she asks, smiling at him. "But it can wait. I should take you to the train station first so you can get your stuff." She's already talking to him like he's going to be here for awhile -- which he will -- and that they're going to be friends, but she's always been like that. Beth cares about people, she likes being around them, and she wants to take care of them when they need it.

He hasn't done everything but he feels like he's got enough stories under his belt by now to last a few years. This was meant to be the last score, the one he'd been waiting twenty years for, but now he was here. Maybe it was meant to be. Maybe Nate was always meant to get out of the game.

He just hadn't expected it to go like this.

"Stuff, right," he echoes, nodding. "All that sorry we kidnapped you compensation stuff. Awesome."

"Sorry," Beth says softly, wincing a little, as if it's her fault they have to do this. "But it's better to have it now than to suddenly find yourself without a place to sleep tonight." She would let him stay at her place if it actually came down to that, but with Daryl, Carl and Judith already there, sometimes there's not a lot of extra space. Besides, she's not sure how much he would like being crawled on by a toddler.

"Come on," she says, her voice gentle as she collects her things. "The train station isn't far and then once you've got it, I can help you find your apartment. I know it's weird and I know you're still gonna try to get home and that's okay. I figure most people need to. I just can't leave you out here with nothin'. I can't do it."

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