debut - beth

[sicparvasmagna]

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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[sicparvasmagna]

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."

[a_littlefaith]

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.

[sicparvasmagna]

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.

[a_littlefaith]

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."

[sicparvasmagna]

"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.

[a_littlefaith]

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."

[sicparvasmagna]

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."

[a_littlefaith]

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?"

[sicparvasmagna]

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."

[a_littlefaith]

"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.

[sicparvasmagna]

"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."

[a_littlefaith]

"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.

[sicparvasmagna]

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."

[a_littlefaith]

"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."