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nathandrakeisabottom · 2 months ago

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★ The Earnest Nathan Drake: Prologue ★

(Optional: to be strategically paired & timed with Donna Summer's Last Dance, as all great fics are.) (Thank you for reading. She's been 3 years in the making but just getting started, and happily: my everything.)

Nate Morgan is all of five and two-twelfths years old. And in a universe full of mystery and intrigue, of love and history, of hate and greed, of men who choose to craft weapons and men who are forced to wield them, of Columbus and da Vinci, of Caesar and salads (the kind with big, fat watermelon chunks in the middle), of the fun fact that every human brain will spend the entirety of its life eating itself, and the fear of long words being as whimsically wonderful a word as hippopotomonstrosesquippedaliophobia, only five things will ever be for certain:

Nate Morgan has never fired a gun.

Nate Morgan cries when other kids are mean to him.

Nate Morgan has a double-jointed thumb on his right hand.

Nate’s favorite color is yellow.

And—

He has been practicing his entire life for this one exact moment.

Well, maybe like a week. Sam curry-oh-graphed the dance on toots-day.

⋆⋆⋆

Nathan Drake is all of twenty four and two-twelfths years old. He has most definitely fired a gun now.

The world is smaller. Turns out his fascination with Columbus was a hair overblown. Now, only four things are for certain:

Nathan Drake definitely does not cry when other kids are mean to him anymore.

Nathan Drake has a double-jointed thumb on his right hand.

Nathan Drake’s favorite color is blue.

And—

They have been practicing their whole lives for this one exact moment.

Well, maybe like a month.

Sam mapped the jail break plans on Wednesday.

And Nathan, conveniently for them, has most definitely fired a gun before.

⋆⋆⋆

Nate Morgan wasn’t always a crybaby. And Nate’s favorite color most sur-ten-lee wasn’t always yellow.

⋆⋆⋆

But, then again, Nathan Drake wasn’t always a killer, either. Because at one point, the world-renowned thief, con artist, combat expert, card-counter, legendary killing machine Nathan Drake— the kind of man people far less interesting than him wrote, lived, and died for stories of— wanted nothing more…

Than to be a dancer.

⋆⋆⋆

Sam taught him the word ‘curry-oh-graph’ on Monday, and ‘curry-oh-graph’ is a pretty big word, which means that Nate is officially the smartest kid in the whole entire world now. After Sam, of course. Always after Sam. That was just the way the world was then. Sky was blue. Puppies were soft. And Nate came after Sam.

It was only fair since Nate already got to be first in the alphabet. And when Sam explained it that way, everything made perfect sense. And in those days, to Nate, that was the only thing that mattered: for things to make sense. And for the things that made sense to happen.

On that wed-ness-day in the summer of 1981, Nate didn’t think he’d ever been happier. Because he didn’t think he’d ever be happier. And on that day in the summer of 1981, Nate Morgan was almost maybe right.

He just didn’t know it yet.

⋆⋆⋆

Nathan Drake wishes he still remembered a time when he didn’t know things yet.

⋆⋆⋆

“Me and Sam—”

“Sam and I, sweetie.” The Woman corrects politely, ankle over ankle in their least broken porch chair, the infamous ‘Sidewalk-Slasher’, a piece of snowy plastic hanging on for dear life at the bottom of leg number 3.

“Sam n’ I—” Nate says with a smile. He and She nod satisfiedly. “Made this for your birf-day gift. Sam curry-oh-graphed it, but I picked the song first and moved the boombox when we needed to move the boombox.”

“I also recorded the song.” Sam bellows from behind a speaker the size of his head.

“H-he also recorded the song, but I picked the song, and remembered most of the name of the lady who sang the song, and I think that’s just as import-teent.”

“Carry on, then.” The Man next to her, decked head to toe in matching discare and five-o’-clock shadow, waves an offhand palm.

“Import-eent. Import-aunt.” Nate tries. He fails.

“It’s okay, Nate.”

“Im-pert-tant. Im-purt-tant.” Nate tries. He blubbers between baby teeth.

“Don’t matter, kiddo. Let’s see it.”

Sam nearly trips himself silly— stoopid shoelaces— on his way to launching a feather boa over the top of Nate’s shoulders. He had begged his little heart out for the blue one with sparkle tinsel in between, and so Sam had given him the blue with the sparkle tinsel in between, even though Nate knew Sam didn’t like purple very much. And the other one was totally purple. And Sam didn’t really like purple. And Sam didn’t really like purple one bit. But Sam was just like that, anyway.

Sam was good like that.

The Man gives Her a raised eyebrow when Nate plucks out a tail-end feather and tucks it preen-ing-lee behind his ear. She says nothing, all smiles too wide for her boo-tee-full, sun-kissed face.

“Happy birthday, Mom.” Sam grins with more teeth than Nate can possibly count. And without another word, he presses his stubby thumb into the boombox’s pebble of a play button, and the music begins. The moment Nate, five years and two months old, has waited his entire goddamn life for.

She presses her hand to her chest the second the tender notes of a flute emerge.

“Oh, I love this song.”

As Donna Summer croons her opening riff, Nate readies himself into position, right in the middle of a bright yellow ‘X’, chalked three days before and having barely survived a multi-midnight sprinkler head, just like Sam had taught him to. He always found it was easier when he just told him where to start.

And Nate thought: how lucky he was, luckier than every kid in every neighborhood, in every state, in every dynasty, in every kingdom, in every generation, in every planet, in the entire world, to never have to decide things on his own ever again.

⋆⋆⋆

“What… what do I do?” Nathan heaves with every breath the bleeding mass before them cannot, words barely lilted beneath the bellowing emergency alarm and the ringing tinnitus of someone else’s firearm. “What do we do?”

But today, it’s not Sam who says it: “We stick to the plan.”

“Was this part of the plan?!” Panic fizzles between his lips, legs shellacked in place, eyes too beholden to the horror, the betrayal— he knew if something fucked up, it would all be Rafe’s fault, Rafe who Nathan told him not to trust, Rafe who had far less to lose and a far more million dollars to return home to— to the impulse kill all of them swore would never, ever be necessary again.

But where Rafe breaks every promise made, Sam holds fast. And he does what Nathan needs more than anything. He grabs him by the hand.

And he tells him what to do.

“COME ON!”

⋆⋆⋆

“Las’ dance—” Nate mumbles under his breath. A slow sway to his right. A slow sway to his left. A piece of the boa’s tinsel catches in his eyelash when he moves his arm too high, and Sam smacks his shoulder back to focus when he starts to rub his eye. “Las’ chance fer’ love—”

⋆⋆⋆

“Rafe, where we goin’ ‘ere?” Sam asks in Nathan’s stead, lungs too burned with oxygen to even consider speech. Mind too spellbound by the sight of the dead body upon the carpet, a body he had known, considered an ally not even one minute previous. That man was a body.

A body with a name.

⋆⋆⋆

“Yesh, it’s my las’ chance—”

“Nate-ya-don’t-have-ta-sing-it. She’s-already-singin’-it.” Sam hisses between notes.

“M‘kay.”

But Nate just makes sure to say the words quieter this time.

“For romance—” A sway left. A pointed toe, just like Sam taught.

“Tonight—” Another sway right. Another pointed toesy.

He had wanted to understand the words, even though Sam said it didn’t really matter.

Nate thought it actually kinda mattered, maybe.

⋆⋆⋆

“Vargas said the boat is right under the lighthouse.” Rafe’s voice laces sickish in its steadiness, eyes beading unseemingly certain to the horizon before them. With a swift tug, the door to the courtyard swings open, and this time, Rafe looks like he might almost consider waiting for them on the other side.

Almost.

Sam’s only confirmation is a single, readying nod, and Nathan considers how his life might’ve changed had he not waited the extra 0.002 seconds to nod back.

⋆⋆⋆

“I need you—” Their hands go out to the folding-chair-throned crowd. Still, Her hands: soft, inspired at her chest. His: balled in fists within stubble-laned, criss-cross-apple-sauced arms.

⋆⋆⋆

When Nathan finally braces his feet against the rolling Panamanian sands, he swears they’ve been hurled straight into a tsunami. He practically chokes on his own breath, his own heartbeat, the horrid, banging sound of alarm caused by his own stupid fucking ‘partner’.

He told Sam. He fucking told him not to trust him.

⋆⋆⋆

“By me—” Nate and Sam point to their left side.

⋆⋆⋆

“I don’t see the lighthouse.” Nathan gasps when the Caribbean sun blinds too bright for him to even know which way is up.

“Right now, let’s just get away from the guards!”

Rafe mutters with a crook of his jaw, the sound of a double dozen boots on concrete already pounding down the stairs behind them, and it’s only Sam’s urging hand that tells him where to throw his body next.

⋆⋆⋆

“Beside me—” Nate and Sam point to their right side.

“To guide me—” Nate clamps one tiny, clammy palm into Sam’s. Sam ushers him two steps to the left.

Get it? Because he’s guiding him, so—

⋆⋆⋆

So, when Sam’s palm pulls free— a jolt of panic searing awful and electric through his chest— the only thing Nathan tells himself is to keep running toward wherever Sam last told him to.

“Nathan, down this way!”

Chest heaves, chest heaves, chest rattles, chest chokes, chest breaks. Failing laser precision upon the blue smudge of a uniform racing through the milling hoards of screeching, panicked prisoners.

⋆⋆⋆

“To hold me—” Sam wraps his little arms around himself with a simple sway. Nate mimics.

Get it? Because—

⋆⋆⋆

He tries to pretend he doesn’t see the dots of red light attempting to scrape up and over his back with every lunge.

⋆⋆⋆

“To scold me—”

Sam waggles a single finger, eyebrows scrunched into his forehead. Nate mirrors.

⋆⋆⋆

“The fire escape.” His brother seems to manifest from nothing. That voice he trusts when all and utter reality slips from beneath him. “Nathan, get me up there!”

⋆⋆⋆

“'Cause when I'm bad—” Nate’s almost maybe pretty sure he hears Sam sing along out of the corner of his earlobe, opting for a simple finger wave and a fist on his hip in exchange for Sam’s index-wriggling devil horns. “I'm so, so bad—”

He thinks The Man’s nostrils flare, but it’s hard to tell with music so good.

⋆⋆⋆

Without another word, he curtails his body into position, hands cupped, folded together like an origami swan a thousand times before… before Sam’s boot is stamping itself between, and his body launches high with a simple flex of Nathan’s arm.

Yet just as he reaches for the plummeting ladder—

“Let’s go!” Rafe’s shoulder collides, and the sickly rodent of a man has disappeared over the roof before Nathan can even grumble back a measly:

“Yeah… after you.”

⋆⋆⋆

But none of it matters now.

“So, let’s dance—”

Nothing can stop him now.

“The last dance—”

⋆⋆⋆

Nathan throws his body in after them, every limb, mind, soul of his sucked up into a gnashing wind tunnel, a hundred invisible hands urging, shoving, begging, hungering him off the nearest ledge.

He can see the lighthouse in the distance. There is hope, he screams. There is hope, he pleads.

⋆⋆⋆

“Let’s dance—”

And now there’s no doubt in his mind that Sam is singing right along with, because there’s no other reason Nate’s cheeks would hurt so much from smiling. Because there never was before.

And to Nate Morgan, that’s just logic.

“The last dance—”

Plain and simple.

⋆⋆⋆

Even as he leaps after Sam and Rafe for the next awning, and his entire world crumbles in after him.

⋆⋆⋆

But still Nate knows he’ll survive, because this—

“Let’s dance, this last dance—”

This was always Nate’s favorite part.

⋆⋆⋆

“Seriously?” Nathan guffaws when he’s not met alone on the other side of a forming dust cloud. Unfortunately, the crowd of fist-armed guards surrounding provides no such comedic relief.

One, bald-headed and brutish, swings his bulk up to bat.

“Alright then.”

But it’s okay, because—

⋆⋆⋆

“TONIGHT—!”

It hurts when the big note pulls loose from Nate and Sam’s teeny, tiny throats.

But that’s how Nate knows he’s singing it right.

⋆⋆⋆

Because he wasn’t doing it alone.

“NATHAN!” A baritone voice bellows from above.

And like a god, the one and only, the irreplaceable, the unbreakable, the football-field-forehead wonder Samuel Drake descends from the heavens—

And knocks this guy’s fucking teeth in.

⋆⋆⋆

It always hurts at first when you’re doing it right.

And that’s why Nate doesn’t mind it much, the weird feeling in his tummy, when He, broad arms still so cruelly criss-cross-apple-sauced at what Nates spent almost six whole (half) days preparing for, glares at his little blue boa with the sparkle tinsel in-between the way he does now. Which doesn’t make sense.

He had fought heart and soul for the little blue boa with the sparkle tinsel in-between.

⋆⋆⋆

“Let’s clean house.”

Sam brandishes his (wow, excellent) entrance line like a knight’s sword, and brute force commander-in-chief goes stark white. A ghost before Sam’s fist even needs to make him one.

And now Nathan Drake knows. He knows he’ll live. He knows his fear, his panic, his uncertainty mean shit.

Because no one on the entire planet, in the history of the world, would smile the way Samuel Drake does now unless he knew he was going to live.

And unless he knew he was going to enjoy it.

⋆⋆⋆

Their dance transforms into a manic skirmish. A test of faith of tennis shoe. Nate thinks he’s doing the right moves. He’s pretty sure. He swears he practiced. But the notes come so rich and tasty and vanilla-y and chocolate-y that he forgets his body altogether.

Luckily, he remembers everything actually im-porp-tant.

The trill of Sam’s laughter means he must be doing the same.

⋆⋆⋆

Sam’s jaw goes crooked, but every grin stays intact when a suckerpunch hits him squarely in the stubble-smacked face. So Nathan makes quick, ravenous correction, a twin of white teeth upon his face as he kicks this dickhead even more squarely in the crotch.

The trill of Sam’s wheezing laughter means Nate must actually be doing the choreography correctly this time.

⋆⋆⋆

Again, The Man’s nostrils flare. Which only makes Nate want to dance harder.

⋆⋆⋆

But his brother’s joint jeering is cut short with a lassoed elbow around his neck, clawing fingers fruitless against sun-and-stick-poke-tattoo-scraped skin. Nathan already knows there’s no point in playing Superman.

“You should really work on your flirtin’.” Sam chokes between half-won breaths, a smirk deliciously sour upon his tongue. “We high-class ladies prefer to take things a little slow-uh.”

And with what he already knows must be fifteen more quips in the making, Sam bends over double and sends the grunting chicken over his shoulder and stumbling backwards into the nearest shithole.

Nathan instinctively cheers when he’s too far to fistbump.

⋆⋆⋆

Nate in-stink-tiv-lee reaches for Sam’s outstretched hands when he’s too far to prop-er-lee touch, his stubby fingers already spread in most starry starbursts for the long note. Nate always loved those big starry starbursts for the little long note. Twin giggles race and flutter forth, like a swarm of butterflies when they finally catch palms to swing their bodies in sync. Sam leans back— hard— and Nate squeals in painful delight when it forces them both spinning faster.

Something about Ken— Kinny—-

Kenny en-er-gee. Kin-nee-nee en-er-gee—

The Man leans over to Her and whispers something. A something that makes Her look pointy and mean at him back.

⋆⋆⋆

The next numbskull steps up, attempts for a roundhouse, but the whirling sand drives his stupid body into a stumble, and every ounce of perfect-practiced teamwork comes roaring to the surface. A niche dance bred into their bones. Or perhaps just their easily-bruised knuckles.

Sam and Nathan rush forward in sync: a sprint that turns into a lunge, a lunge that morphs into a grapple, a grapple that ignites into the guard’s body slamming back-first into the ground. It all happens so fast, Nathan doesn’t even have a line prepared by the time Sam is already firing out a ringing:

“Looks like our favorite war-dicks needed a little solitary confinement, huh?”

“Uh-huh.” Nathan nods, breathlessly, stupidly replies.

Great line. Great fucking line.

⋆⋆⋆

Nate’s pretty sure he sees The Man say a word that starts with an ‘eff’.

A word that makes him have to open his mouth all the way.

⋆⋆⋆

And he sparkles. Sam goddamn sparkles when he says it.

“Rafe! Great to see ya!” But Nathan’s not too sure he isn’t imagining the way Rafe’s gaze seethes when Sam manages to latch eyelines upon the rooftop-ed horizon. “Kick that ladder down for us!”

The weak-willed kick on steel is most certainly reluctant. Still, Sam and Nathan jump on in a heartbeat, even when Rafe’s form has disappeared by the time they even touch the first rung. They meet the roof. And there, in the distance, the lighthouse.

There is hope, he screams. There is hope, he pleads.

“He’s going to leave without us, isn’t he?” Yet you’d never think it, the way Nathan grumbles and gasps between sprints.

Fortunately, Sam is even quicker on the rebound, a grin so evident upon his lip that Nathan doesn’t even need to twist his head to see it racing beside him.

“Not if we’re quicker.”

Now, Nathan knows they’ll live to see tomorrow. Because nobody but the most alive people Nathan’s ever known smile the way Samuel Drake smiles now.

⋆⋆⋆

Now, it’ll take Nathan nearly a decade and a half to realize it’s the first time he sees it, but far from the last—

The first time he saw the look of a woman ready to kill a man.

Because nobody but the most deadly people Nathan’s seen on TV, the evil TV times when he axe-dent-lee sneaks glances on his way to the toilet, glare at someone the way She glares at Him now.

But maybe She was just pass-ee-nate about how good him and Sammy’s dancing is.

Nate most ser-taint-lee was.

⋆⋆⋆

Nathan Drake knows. He knows everything.

He knows Nathan and Samuel will live to see tomorrow.

Samuel and Nathan will live to see tomorrow.

⋆⋆⋆

Because they’re good.

Sam and Nate are good.

It’s what She must be saying out of the corner of her pink, pretty, pursed mouth back to Him. The Sidewalk-Slasher is steered, rattles with a single hopping sandal. But her eyes never stray from them, because she wants to watch every move.

Gosh, Nate wants Her to watch every move.

He made them for Her.

⋆⋆⋆

“They’re everywhere.” Nathan’s jaw croaks, aches, unhinges and begs, ears filled with more whizzing bullets than words.

The fire in every pinched muscle has long gone blue, where pain becomes so painful that it twists back onto the other side as numbness. Still, Nathan runs. There’s no other option now.

But maybe there was never another option before.

“We’ll be fine, just keep going!” Sam yells just out of periphery.

If only someone would tell Nathan’s legs that.

He doesn’t realize he’s slowing down until Sam’s palm collides with his back, a desperate shove, an uncharacteristic rattle of his voice. A bright yellow “X” chalked on the pavement. Nate only knows because Sam is the one who always told him where to move next.

“Nathan… GO!”

⋆⋆⋆

But still her face, haloed by billowing clouds of brunette, is the most boo-tee-full shade of pink as she replies with something Nate can’t quite hear. She’s singing the lyrics, she’s saying what an eggs-see-lent box step that was, she’s telling him some hundred-aire relative died and now they can finally afford to put Nate in those YMCA dance classes he begged them for, practically sprung himself a leak for.

The ones with two zeros on the price tag when He kept saying they were only worth one.

Nate thought maybe they could be worth more than one.

Nate wanted to matter more than one.

⋆⋆⋆

The lighthouse. The lighthouse. The lighthouse.

So close Nathan can taste the burning sulfur on his tongue. Can taste the stench of sea. Of salt, of a hundred million buzzing lightbulbs, of collapsing brick, of wet sand beneath blistered toesies. Nathan Drake can taste blood in his mouth. He can taste the taste of freedom.

“On me! Get to the wall!” Rafe bellows a few feet ahead, pointing where roof meets air, where nothing meets nothing, and where untouched foliage signals home free on the other side. “NOW!”

And the pain in his lungs, in his legs, in his ears, in his heart is so good. The pain means he’s doing it right. The pain means he’s earned it. The pain means he’s paid his dues. The pain means he’s going to live.

“Sam?!” Nathan’s voice quivers.

“Just keep goin’!” Sam responds, some distant wind. “I’m-right-behind-ya!”

⋆⋆⋆

And the dance blooms into a creature so boo-tee-full, so eck-squick-sick, so every word in every language that Nate doesn’t know yet but can’t wait to learn, and will be able to make so many new friends when he does, make his wildest dreams come try and maybe even one day be as in-telly-jent as Her, that there’s no doubt in his mind that the reason Her and His faces are so red from screaming now is because they know that Nate Morgan was born to be a dancer.

He throws himself back to back with his brother, an itty bitty fist makeshifting for a proper microphone, and for the first time in his entire six years of life, Sam is the one who follows him. Another itty bitty fist when Mommy’s vitamins are too expensive to afford the plastic ones at the department store that echo when you talk into them.

His face hurts from smiling. His body hurts from smiling. Everything hurts from smiling.

He loves her music. He loves her hair. He loves the pavement. He loves his brother. He loves that Sam finally trusted him enough to carry the boombox. He loves that there’s new words he doesn’t know yet. Nate loves to dance.

Nate loves to live.

⋆⋆⋆

But it’s nothing short of suicide: the way Nathan catapults his bruised body off the roof and into the nothingness beyond— before both hands latch hard to the nearest pipe and leverage himself back onto the opposite ledge. Home fucking free. But Nathan Drake isn’t a coward. He doesn’t forsake the way Rafe does.

“SAM!” He bellows back as loud as his haggard lungs will allow, Sam’s face twisting towards him from the other side. “C’mon! I’ll pull you up!”

And it’s just the adrenaline that makes Sam’s face look so small, so soft, so wet, so crumpled, eyebrows knitted into the middle of his glossy forehead, face whipping back and forth between him and the sea of bullets behind.

And “S” comes before “N” in the alphabet. So Samuel comes after Nathan.

And Sam jumps. And Sam is jumping. And Sam is falling.

Sam is falling hard.

And Nathan is catching, saving, him where it actually fucking matters.

“I-gotcha-I-gotcha—” Thus he proves in rapid spurts, arm burning with the weight as Sam launches his slick palm into Nathan’s grasp. One hand in another. Sweat and grime and dumb fucking luck, the dumb fucking luck they had always had, the dumb fucking luck they had earned because everything else always went to shit, all that he was, all that Sam gave him, meeting sweat and grime and—

Something else entirely.

⋆⋆⋆

The final note positively rips out of Nate’s itty bitty, teeny tiny, soul-engulfed chest, everything bad, everything evil in the world dead and gone under dang good music, the kind his mommy gifted him through the dying midnight radio, and bright blue sparkle tinsel. Because Sam said he’d have finally enough allowance saved up for a proper yellow one on Monday.

And he can’t see anything but goodness. He won’t ever again.

His eyes are squeezed too tight to see anything else.

⋆⋆⋆

BANG!

It’s bright and pretty like tinsel, actually. A rhythmic rattle like the drums in a good song, too. Familiar.

The spray of bullets is.

⋆⋆⋆

BANG!

And Nate didn’t mean to kick the boombox when he jumped like that. He really didn’t.

It was just this little cartwheel into a high kick he had been practicing. His favorite move. That’s all. He had worked so hard on it. It was the best part of the song.

He thought She would understand.

⋆⋆⋆

Sam is smiling when he coughs up blood. Which Nathan doesn’t understand.

⋆⋆⋆

He doesn’t understand.

The look in The Man’s eyes is searing. Steaming and stinky like burnt coffee. Like the volume of their voices when She can’t get up in the morning so He didn’t get his brekkie in time for work. And so He gets mad. And so He turns into someone else.

But this time, the look is on Nate. It’s at Nate, all for Nate, only for Nate. It’s at Nate for kicking the boombox. Because it’s skipping a little. Just a little, he swears. But the Man never liked it when the music skipped. Liked it even less than Sam liked the color purple.

Nate’s stomach feels rumbly.

It was just a little— Just a little— He swears— He didn’t mean to—

Sam rushes in so fast, The Man is barely sitting up from his chair before his focus on Nate is dashed for something else entirely.

⋆⋆⋆

“Sam?” Nathan asks when he doesn’t understand. “Sam?”

He doesn’t understand.

The Panamanian sun spotlights them in a halo of light, and Sam silently pleads with little green flakes in his big, brown eyes. Guess Nathan never really looked in his brother’s eyes long enough to notice them before.

He wishes he had noticed them before.

⋆⋆⋆

And Nate bemoans in horror when Sam abruptly picks the giant boombox up over his head and smashes it hard to the crumbling cement below.

It doesn’t make any sense.

SMASH! SMASH! SMASH!

It doesn’t make any sense.

A million little shards of plastic and glass scatter in a blinding ray over the pavement. And Sam’s little eyebrows are pinched in the middle of his forehead. They’re pinched so hard that Nate is afraid the skin between his eyes is going to tear and tear until it snaps in half, and his face is going to bleed out all over their chalk.

He imagines the blood.

⋆⋆⋆

“SAM!”

Nathan cries when Sam’s body drops instantaneously, taking every force of will he has to hold fast to the five fingers God left. He gasps, shoulder screams in fruitless force when he’s not strong enough to hold him to the ledge. His brother: no help but a stone, an anvil, a taxidermied elephant, a hundred million useless comparisons that could only ever be used to describe a dead weight. He doesn’t understand.

He doesn’t understand. He was going to live. They were going to live.

Sam told him they were going to live.

“Hold on! Please-hold-on-Sam! Give-me-your-other-arm—!” Nathan cries and wails and bellows down below. He can’t see, there’s too many tears. He was useless when he sprung a leak. The Man always said it was useless when he sprung a— “Come-on-reach!”

But there is only sweat and grime to meet his own now. Any luck was only His to carry.

“No— SAM—!”

The better brother.

And so, the better brother slips from his fingers—

And the body bangs hard into unfathomable darkness below.

A body with a name.

⋆⋆⋆

SLAP!

Dad’s hand collides with Sam’s cheek, and Nate’s stomach binds in knots, just like the cat’s cradles at daycare he’s always too stupid, stupid, stupid to ever do right.

“SAM! C’mon, man! That was expensive!”

And it doesn’t make sense. None of it makes any sense at all.

Why would a person hit someone who already knew what they did was wrong? Sam was smarter than that. Sam was the smartest person in the whole world. Dad knew that. Dad invented that.

Why would you hit something so small like that?

“Sorry.” Sammy says stiffly, a big, nasty, red splotch of skin staring back.

Nate doesn’t understand.

“Who knows how long it’s gonna take for your mother and I to be able to spring for a new one, bud.” He replies, voice quiet, husky and heavy with diss-uh-point-mint, fingers reaching up to pinch the thick bridge of his nose. “That wasn’t very fair to your brother, was it?”

Sammy looks down at his little untied tenny shoes.

“I said, ‘That wasn’t very fair to Nathan now, was it?’”

Nate feels like he’s gonna frew-up. Nate didn’t say that.

Sammy swallows. For a moment, he says nothing.

“...No.”

“That’s right.” He nods satisfiedly, a bittersweet pucker at the corner of his mouth. A forlorn sigh as he kicks a loose chunk of speaker into the pile. Exchanges a thinky sort of look with Her. “Guess we’re gonna need to take that out of your allowance for a while, bud. That sounds fair, right?”

The yellow boa. But– But– But– Sam had been saving—

Sammy swallows harder this time. For a moment, he says nothing at all.

“...Okay.”

And Sam is the biggest, tallest, most bright, most alive creature Nate has known in five. whole. years. of ex–ee-stance. He is. He is. Until the very second Dad’s words decide he’s bigger than him, and Sammy deserves to be smaller. And none of it makes sense.

Only things that make sense are supposed to happen.

Nate’s hand slowly wobbles up to his own cheek, a careful caress where Sam got hit. He tries to imagine feeling it. Like maybe that’ll take some of the pain away.

He imagines super duper hard.

“Let’s get this cleaned up, yeah? Go grab the broom from the garage.” Dad’s voice: too soft for how red Sam’s face is. Or maybe his face is just too small to hold all the color He had to give. “Samuel? Now.”

But when Sam obeys, he holds his hands over his face too high for Nate to be able to tell.

And so, Nate imagines. Nate imagines. Nate imagines so hard he thinks his head’s going to ex-plobe.

⋆⋆⋆

“We gotta move!” Yet Rafe’s desperate attempts at safety, a rousing shake of his shoulder, yield no alternative reality.

“No-no-he’s-still-down-there.’ Nathan imagines, Nathan pretends, Nathan screeches and grovels and begs and plays like they used to do when they were kids. When God still allowed them the mercy to be stupid.

Stupid, stupid, stupid.

“C’mon, the boat’s just beyond the wall.” Nothing but noise past the gunfire, useless drivel beyond the screams.

“I can’t— I-can’t-leave-him-behind.” It’s not an excuse, he promises.

He promises. He swears.

It’s just the honest truth.

But a pointless mystery: whether the colors melting and merging and molting before his eyes are tears, snot, drool, or blood. Like there’s no use for any sense other than touch, the rest of his body: useless without another half. His teeth chatter from the cold. Everything hurts.

He peers down into the dark.

He peers super duper hard.

He begs the darkness for movement. A flinch, a thrash. Life was supposed to be kind enough to let him fight for it first. Sam always fought for it first. It couldn’t be his Sam if he didn’t get to fight for it first.

And Nathan Drake hasn’t prayed in twelve whole years.

But today he prays to God to just let him see the body first.

⋆⋆⋆

Un-fort-tinny-lee, Nate was only ever good at imagining things that were real.

Smack.

The first slap is a quaint, curry-us sort of thing. A bad puppy on his tush for chewing the morning slippers. His cheek is warm from the dance, but his fingers oddly ice cold. Little nubs and peels of skin from scratching scabs or picking gravel from the playground against the soft brush of blush. But no other thinks cross his head. He looks down at the pads of his fing-ees. Sees no red like Sam’s when he retreats.

But, no—

No, that’s not right, though. It’s supposed to hurt when you’re doing it right.

So, this time Nate reels his hand back a little. Just a little.

So Mommy won’t think he went bad and stole her makeup.

Smack.

This time, Nate gasps a little. The cold makes him jump, but the sting itself makes him whimper. He catches his own eye in the mistaken crossfire, and Nate squeaks in sudden pain, a groan oozing out the tail end. A single tear leaking from the soon-swollen corner. He didn’t notice the think-less chews during class made his nails all stubby and sharp like that.

But most luckily for him, when Nate pulls back, he sees exactly the red he wanted.

A single, crescent-shaped slice of blood from a lone hangnail off his double-jointed thumb. No more than the width of a fingernail. A little pet of a thing. Alive and buzzing in a smear off his thumbprint, twenty— no, thirty— times brighter than Sam’s red.

Which makes sense.

SMACK. — Again, just because Nate did it in the wrong place the first time.

Dad made them for him.

⋆⋆⋆

It shouldn’t have been for him.

It was for anyone else but him.

His brother was alive. His brother deserved to be alive. His brother was born to be alive.

Oh God, the body, the body, please, just let him see—

“Nate, your brother is dead.” But the only God Nathan knows is the one he met at the orphanage. The one that punishes, not because he wants, not because he needs. “Either come with me, or join him.”

The one who kills just because He can.

The body, the body, he hasn’t seen the body yet, he’s still down there, he could still be down there, Sam might still be—

“We just—” Nate tries.

“Have it your way.” But his tries don’t matter. They never did.

His voice, his voice, just one last word, one last sentence, he never got to say—

⋆⋆⋆

“Fathers can be a little funny sometimes, huh?”

Yet her voice is gentle, textured and crisp like little patters of fallen rain when at last She speaks. She poises one leg folded over another, over folds and folds of yellow sundress, one sandaled foot, hopping madly as it attempts to steer the wave-ward Sidewalk-Slasher straight again. But her face… calm as an ocean breeze. Freckles to be mistaken for sea glass along her shore.

Nate noticed that they liked to ask questions a lot. Sam said it was just a thing smart people did. It mostly just made Nate feel dumber.

“Funny.” He echoes softly.

She nods. He mimics.

Repeats the lyrics so he’s sure he understands them.

“That was very nice, Nate.” But her teeth seem to sort of hug each other when she says it. Her cheeks: now since softened to a tender shade of pink. “You looked like you were having a lot of fun.”

“Birfday.” He says simply, because He slapped the ‘happy’ off onto the cement somewhere.

“Birthday.” She corrects with a warm, wide grin.

But she is so boo-tee-full, and she has these little wrinkles at the corners of her mouth because she smiles so much, rep-ee-teet-shin like the sharp carves that turn into the shape of a goat on ancient mess-oh-potato-um pottery, that he doesn’t really mind needing core-eck-shin. She is pottery, that’s what she is. Only she holds life instead of water.

So he replies with a matching grin, so he can one day make his lines big enough to hold all the life she has. He doesn’t quite. But he tries. God, does he try. His feet ring and writhe and buzz beneath countless velcro straps, his teeth: a mess of stinging squares from how hard he fights to bare them, and his cheek—

Matters little. Because just as Her hand reaches out to touch—

“Nathan, what did—?”

Nate is rushing past, great leaps across the dancefloor, their joint battlefield, to Sammy, who marches gloomily from the castle dungeon, a swinging broadsword in his hand.

At least, that’s what he looks like to Nate. And so it must be so.

“Tank you.” Nate wetly garbles against Sam’s crumpled t-shirt as soon as he’s pulled him into a prop-er-lee lung-crushing hug, the bristles of the garage broom licking at his ankles like tadpoles from a curious tidepool wave.

“Why?” Sam asks.

But Nate knows Sam is too smart to need the answer.

⋆⋆⋆

It should’ve taken him, instead.

And Nathan wonders, ever so briefly, that if he said the words aloud, begged the whizzing bullets, asked for the only thing he wanted, could ever want again, that the universe would make it come true. And Sam would be here instead of him, sobbing like a weak, pathetic, scared little crybaby over a fallen hula hoop.

But that doesn’t make sense. And only the things that make sense are allowed to happen.

Sam never cried the way Nate did.

Maybe that’s precisely why Nathan Drake only drags a sleeve across his weeping eye once, rattles out a single, ragged sniffle, before he finally stops trying altogether— and follows Rafe right off the cliffs of Panama.

⋆⋆⋆

Someone smarter, someone older, someone more alive than Nate could ever be on his own would know why Samuel Morgan hugs him back in place of an answer.

⋆⋆⋆

And Nathan Drake was finally old enough, smart enough, and— fuck God— alive enough to know the only answer, the only future people like them could ever afford: was to leave his own brother for dead.

★★★

#this is the super beta version of this intro... so thoughts are welcome!#uncharted #nathan drake #uncharted 4 #uncharted 4: a thief's end #sam drake #samuel drake #tend #my stuff #anyway this is one part of my 100k oc/nathan slow burn friends to lovers sam-grieving canon compliant fic of my dreams #it's about mental illness and gender and guilt and people and why they rule and why they suck and stories and how they build and destroy us #it’s also about colors and f3mdom :)#thanks for asking anon eeeee #i'll talk about it endlessly if you let me

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