My Uncharted blog side where I make sweet tender love to Nate and you pay in likes to watch. Kind of an "x reader" blog, kind of an OC blog, kind of a self-shipping blog. Shay's confused, she just knows that her and the harness twunk are in love. Main is @lilsnatch. Suc Penis Magnum. ⭐ FIC MASTERLIST! ⭐
By your one and only top gamer-girl, nathandrakeisabottom. :)
⭑ - my personal favorites!
THE EARNEST NATHAN DRAKE (or HOW I LEARNED TO KILL THE RABBIT): (???k+)
One year post-death of the only family he's ever known, Nathan Drake is siren-called back into the rush of gun-slinging adventure. But with only a suspiciously-withdrawn Sully and a tracklist of disco hits to combat against the psychological revenge of a man long past dead, he'll be forced to partner with a mysterious girl-- donning bright orange pants to a stealth mission-- to find the answer to the question:
Was it a gift, or the universe's greatest punishment, to be the brother forced to live?
If you're going to read any of my smut fics, this is the one to read. Yes, it's an S/I fic, easily the most personal thing I've ever written, but trust me, this is the one you can not miss. DVP, porn with lots of feelings, breeding kink, mommy kink, 12k words long (yes, really).
⭑ Mommy II - Nathan x Reader
Spiritual successor to Mommy I. Finding Libertalia, making do on promises made over stolen moonshine, and feeding the wilting flower. Mommy kink, riding, pseudo-breastfeeding, cunnilingus, exhibitionism, cum-eating, love confession, love, love, love.
⭑ What You Really Want - Nathan x Reader x Sam
The 8k Drake Brothers threesome of your dreams. Porn with feelings, sharing a sleeping bag, wet dreams, cunnilingus, double penetration, lots of kissing.
⭑ The Man That Made Me Orange Juice - Epilogue!Nathan x Reader
13k words of divorced dilf lovin' action. As Cassie's best friend and recent Master's graduate, it's time to show the first man you ever loved what you learned... from the kitchen counter to the shower. Age gap, gentle femdom, cunnilingus, P-in-V, multiple rounds.
⭑ Pretty Boy Down - Nathan x Reader
Nathan Drake's first time getting pegged. Pegging, rimming, light slapping, role-playing. The original reason I made this blog.
⭑ Saving Horses - Sam x Reader
On a quiet beach in Madagascar, you ride Sam and try your best to teach him that he doesn't need to fight anymore: with mixed results. Gentle femdom, trauma, switches being switches.
Whatever's Fair in Love and War - Sam x Reader (...And?)
Sam Drake is a man of multitudes, and never satisfied with just one. You unfortunately, just might be the same. An erotic montage collage. Mentions of Nathan x Reader.
THE ONE SHOTS: (2k+)
⭑ Making it Better - Nathan x Reader
In a motel room in Buenos Aires, Nate holds you in his arms and tells you how he got his scars. Rated T after first couple paragraphs. 2:19 in this SNL sketch.
⭑ Imprisoned, Impressioned - Nathan x Reader
As a guard, you probably shouldn't be hooking up with your prisoners. Unfortunately, one pretty boy exception eludes your every rule. Rimming, femdom, bondage.
⭑ What Lovers Share - Nathan x Reader
Nathan tells you historical fun facts while you warm his globes. Huevos in French. Cum-eating, ball-sucking, cock-warming, fun facts.
My Girl, Our Girl (or The One in the Shower) - Nathan x Reader x Sam
A casual little MFM threesome in the shower. Because some places were built for three. Shower sex, hotel sex, high sex, P-in-V.
He Begs - Nathan x Reader
Nathan Morgan draws you... naked, and as the inspiring anon wrote, Nathan Drake begs to eat it. Cunnilingus, gentle femdom, subspace.
Whiplash - Nathan x Reader
Nathan Drake “takes care of you” after a panic attack. Public sex, cunnilingus, riding Nathan's face and him being super into it. :)
Hidden in the Tall Grass - Sam x Reader
Sam forces you to go down on him after a stressful battle. If I had to write that, you have to read it. Public sex, deep-throating, wearing his sherpa jacket.
In the Waters of Peru - Nathan x Reader
You try to convince yourself you're not in love with Nathan Drake and fail miserably. Skinny dipping (!), friends to lovers, desperate pining. SFW.
When Sunlight Hits - Nathan x Reader
Tender, exploratory flirting in an estate in Italy. Playing chicken for confessions, and you never lose a game you start. SFW.
The Cob in Our Stars - Nathan x Reader
Nathan ditches a top secret mission to... bring his lover a cup of esquites. Kissy, corny (literally) fluff. SFW.
THE MOVIE POPCORN: (Headcanons)
8=D & General NSFW Headcanons - The Uncharted Boys: Nathan x Reader, Sam x Reader, Sully x Reader, Rafe x Reader, Harry x Reader, Charlie x Reader
Everything under the sun. Role preference, girth/length, hair headcanons, underwear headcanons, & the singular reason they're not an absolute sex god.
Nathan Drake NSFW Alphabet - Nathan x Reader
My first attempt to monopolize the Nathan Drake x reader tag. Public sex, bondage, oral, masturbation, sex toys, femdom, butt stuff. :)
Sam Drake NSFW Alphabet - Sam x Reader
Includes Sam's sexy playlist for your listening pleasure. Daddy kink, public sex, wax, oral, masturbation, stinky man has fat cock.
Nathan Drake Domestic Headcanons - Nathan x Reader
What happens when the smoke-stained henleys come off and the novelty aprons come on? A day in the life of everyone's dream house husband.
Uncharted Characters as Pot Smokers - Nathan x Reader, Sam x Reader
I would sell my soul to smoke weed with these guys. And then kiss them on the mouth. So I wrote about it for a while. This is the result.
Their Dirtiest Kinks - Nathan x Reader, Sam x Reader
Not your cutesy, girlie-pop step-sister's headcanons. For our resident dirty girls/boys/etc, godspeed.
REQUESTS:
THE EARNEST NATHAN DRAKE: Prologue (My personal longfic & masterpiece) - Childhood & Mid-20s Nathan and Sam. Set to Donna Summer.
Nathan with a Neurodivergent S/O - Nathan x Reader, SFW
Taking Care of Wounded Nate - Nathan x Reader, SFW
Drake Brothers with an Anxious S/O - Nathan x Reader, Sam x Reader, SFW
Drake Brothers Assisting with Chores - Nathan x Reader, Sam x Reader, SFW
Eating/Favorite Food Headcanons - Sam Drake, SFW
Nathan with an S/O Afraid of Heights - Nathan x Reader, SFW
Receiving Oral Headcanons - Nathan x Reader, NSFW
EXTRANEOUS: (Not these fucking things)
Shea Gives Writing Advice! - (To the Best of Her Ability)
Who am I to judge for you trusting a freak like me?
⭑ The 'Why I Don't Ship Nate and Elena' Essay - by Me
HOLD ON. Let me cook. And don't apologize for your passions, kids.
⭑ The 'Why I Don't Ship Nate and Elena' Essay: Part 2: An Emotional Addendum (or Why Nathan Drake Has No Character Arc) - by Me
That's right. There's more... with textual evidence. (Yeah, I was an AP English geek in HS. Maybe I like writing essays.)
Uncharted 4 Deleted Scene - (Tatianna vs Raven)
When I first played UC4, you know what I said?
"This is JUST like Ru Paul's Drag Race."
Another Uncharted 4 Deleted Scene - (Aja vs Valentina)
Here to satisfy your need for some uncharted-related talking!
Something I've been thinking about after this post is: what would've happened if Nadine had mentioned Sam during the fight at the Rossi mansion? Like, she has been working with Sam as well, she knows they're brothers. Imagine she dropped a line like "You're just as annoying as your brother" or maybe even something more direct: "we haven't been enduring your brother's smartassery for the last two years only for you to get that cross now".
What do you think what Nate would do? If he'd known about Sam's lie this early on? Would he carry on regardless? Get out and try to fix things with Elena? I'm curious what you think about it ^^
Thank you for the ask, friend! :)
In all frankness, I genuinely can't imagine Nate reacting any other way but denial. At the point of the Rossi heist, he is clearly having the time of his life. Even Sully's concerns are waved off with a shrug and a smile. While he'd no doubt stutter and furrow his brow in response if Nadine said something sketchy af mid-mission, I think the second he brought it up to Sam post-fight, Sam would no doubt blame it on her lying and trying to trip him up, and that would probably be the end of that. He might be 10% more suspicious, and make the occasional concerned expression, but I genuinely believe--- where he emotionally and mentally is at this point in the game--- very little would actually change between this option and the game we see in canon.
I think people really want to see Nathan as this infinitely moral, completely rational, perfect man who would've dodged out and patched things up with Elena the second he could. I would argue otherwise. He hasn't done the thing he loved in three years. Even without Sam's persuasion, Nate is clearly not satisfied in the mundane married life he has made himself. We see it ourselves in Nate's immediate smile at Sam's "No, we are", before logic and guilt make him respond against it verbally. I think he wanted an excuse to live the life he really wanted again, and Sam was the convenient excuse. I think this early on, it would be convenient for Nathan to assume it was a lie on Nadine's part, in order to keep that fun and adventure going... so I think he would.
He wants things. He wants this life. Despite everything, he's not "above" that. And I think it would require, as is in game, other consequences actively showing in front of his face before he'd be willing to look closer at what Nadine said back at the Rossi.
The Earnest Nathan Drake (or How I Learned to Kill the Rabbit): Chapter 8 - Enter Stratford
Summary: After a lonely five weeks, four days, and twenty-two hours since Nathan Drake took on his first mission without his departed brother in the deserts of Luxor, Egypt, two unlikely companions are brought back together in a cherry-blossom-scented motel room in Stratford-Upon-Avon.
The question still on Drake's mind, now more relevant than ever: To be... or not to be?
Warning: One instance of assault. Enjoy some connective tissue leading into the wild ride that is mission number two.
⋆⋆⋆
Word Count: 8.4k / AO3 MIRROR
“Dale este puta mojada una toalla. Él va a manchar mi bote.”
But Nate can’t see exactly who’s saying the words right now.
The water.
The Gulf of Panama, despite resting neatly in the dead middle of summer, is the coldest nonconsenting swim of Nathan’s life— only one degree helped by the ratty half foot of terrycloth immediately lobbed into his weeping head. He’s rocking to and fro in the hull of some unnamed ship. Motion, seasickness, his own soul tearing every tendon to escape his body: those are things he understands.
But everything else: colors, people, warmth, comfort. They don’t exist anymore. Not here. The colors, they blur. The people, only shapes. Only measly blobs of brown and tan and grey, blurring together, apart, in the rocky hull of an unnamed ship. They don’t matter. They don’t exist. They aren’t real. And nothing is real. Nothing is real.
Because his brother is dead.
“Oh-my-god,” Nathan sputters out more salt water than speech. “Oh-my-god.”
Some foreign force writhes at his shoulder. Nathan flinches back.
“The cross—” It shouts, frightening, maniacal. Nathan can’t hear. He can’t see. His brother is dead. “The cross, do you have it?”
His brother is dead.
“Huh?” He’s blind. He can’t see. His eyes are gone. He doesn’t know where he left them. He doesn’t know where he is.
Where is he? Where is he?
Sound. Words. Some of them almost sound like English. Most of them don’t. The figure snaps his fingers. The colors obey. Nathan’s body goes rocking with the uneven tide. Foreign fists at his sides, slamming down into every pocket. His stomach flips. Nathan feels violated. Don’t touch him, please don’t touch him—
Before weight frees. Bright, shining color in a fist of steel. The figure breathes a sigh of relief. Nathan is dying. He can’t see.
“Oh, thank god.”
His brother is dead.
“T-turn the boat around— Turn the boat—“
He hurtles the chopped remnants of his body at the nearest surface as soon as he’s freed, scrapped-red-raw palms a poor cushion as his head stupidly bangs into an overhead pipe. Collides against steel— his freezing fingers find a round bolt on the wall and force a follow— tossing his limping legs towards the nearest semblance of the vertical. The ‘vertical’— because that’d mean at least a fifty percent chance it was the direction of the door. The spray of the sea.
“He’s losing a lot of blood. Losing, a lot of—”
He remembers the spray of blood.
“Dame un lupa.”
The boat nosedives under a particularly large wave, and Nate wails helplessly as he’s forced to stumble several feet back.
“Que alguien lo calle.” — The voice, disinterested.
But he can make up for the steps lost. He can make the steps up. He was a dancer once.
His brother is dead. His blistered fingers scavenge for another bolt.
“First aid. He needs— Anybody have a first aid kit—?”
Prays for his body to kowtow over and magically slip somewhere into the whipping cold, the booming sea, the chance to swim his way back to him. The chance to fight for it first.
“Would someone please shut him up?”
And Nathan screams as the blurring colors quickly descend on him, vulture claws poked into his rotting carcass, forcing him back to the chair. And the hull of an unnamed ship.
“You listen to me—“
The voice. The voice. Whose voice is it? Where’s Sam?
“I’ve invested too much time and money into you pathetic, whiny, piss-blooded freaks to let you weasel your way out of this at the very last second. This changes nothing. We are going to Scotland and we are finding Avery’s treasure and that will be the end of that whether it kills you or not. This changes nothing, do you hear me?”
“I’m scared.”
But Nathan doesn’t see it coming with all the tears in the way.
SLAP!
And whatever world remained off-kilter falls off its busted hinge entirely. Reality screams back into focus.
“You are going to Scotland. And you are going to find that treasure—“ Rafe yells.
And it wakes him, sobers his bleeding heart up just enough for him to finally spit back:
“Are you crazy? Why on earth would I still want to—“
“Because I fucking told you to, that’s why.”
And Nate goes silent.
His brother is dead.
Their boat hits a wave, and Rafe, drunken in his rage, stumbles back, his ripped sleeve encouraging high to gather the loose spittle from his lip. He snaps at the crew.
“Dejános al Porto de Colón. Y buscános un avión. Rápidamente.”
Nate shivers. Slowly mirrors his own sleeve against his wet, trembling chin.
“And clean that shit off of your face. I won’t be seen in public with something that looks like you.”
Before he pulls back, and there, across the muddied sleeve of his prison uniform, is dark, bleeding, unmistakable red. His vision begins to blur.
There, in the hull of someone else’s one hundred percent paid-off, insurance-covered, unnamed ship, Nathan sits in the uncaringly cold metal of a chair taking him a hundred miles away from his brother’s bleeding corpse.
Once upon a time, two little boys joked over scrambled eggs that perhaps it’d be better if they died together. Funerals cost-ed so much money.
“Nate.” And the name comes so suddenly, so softly that Nathan instinctively flinches back from it. “I’m just doing what Sam would want. You know that, right?”
But the hull is too thick, the ship too expensive, for Him to possibly hear the hundred thousand screams from so many miles away.
“Oh, Jesus Christ. Someone give him another towel to scream into. I can’t focus with all that racket.”
⋆⋆⋆
2PM on the dot, 15:00 if you’re feeling pretentious. Which I know you will be. Be there early or expect a bullet in the head... or be late with a nice single malt Dràr Mór.
— The unmistakable coffeed curves of one Victor Sullivan’s award-winning penmanship, sprawled less-than-ashless (Shay has to wipe a cigar smudge off the top to read whether they offer complimentary breakfast — they don’t) across the yellow, cartoon smiley-sunned pamphlet of The Storybook Inn. And thank god they bothered to add that cartoon smiley-sun wearing the cartoon sunglasses in the pamphlet’s top left corner. Otherwise, Shay might think this place was housing criminals or something.
Luckily, they weren’t. Because check-in was 2pm and it was only 1:58.
Stratford-upon-Avon hits Shay Valentine in as welcoming a smack as this cold world could possibly provide. A woman born from a city of dread and concrete; the emerald glints and spools of evergreen— trees as many, as fruitful as the tourists milling— wooden cross-hatching the color of chocolate sitting atop quaint and clumped townhouses and cottages, sprouting brick chimneys like hands waving hello: for her, it was like being on an alien planet.
She’d never seen the world outside America before.
This season’s accommodations mark a considerable improvement from Luxor, in that now Shay gets to sport a mini skirt without contracting a lesser-known strain of hypothermia. But that doesn’t mean she doesn’t shiver when a light breeze, playful winds tugging on stray strands and split ends through the leaves of juneberry trees and maple, as if wandering sprites pleading for play, whips her through the motel gate. And for the city of Shakespeare, Shay wouldn’t be so surprised if that was true.
Actively hopeful, in fact.
The Storybook Inn better resembles a fairytale cottage than a hole-in-the-wall for storing illegal fire-arms: a plump congregation of bright green shrubbery shields the two-story building from view, dotted arcs of a stone path the only sign of residence at all. But as soon as her eyes pick up from the accordioned pages, already water-logged from a twenty-minute spring shower and half-crumpled post-battle with a particularly aggressive goose, it’s the splitting image of the one on the page.
Which means every fantasy she’s constructed in her apartment alone for the past five weeks, four days, and twenty-two hours since Victor Sullivan sent it to her doorstep must have to be true, too.
The scent of honeysuckle tickles her nose and makes her itch for a cool glass of lemonade, tangles of snow white and eggshell yellow haloing the wispy browns of a brick bungalow. The roof points into a smart triangle at the top, about five windows on each side, surrounded by towering hedge bushes for extra privacy. Privacy: of course, a criminal’s favorite — Shay thinks giddily, even optimistically to herself. Three wide, measly stairs lead the way to a picturesque patio: white rosebush beds parked underneath where the contractor probably forgot to put windows and a crisp, steel bench with elegant swirls at the ends beside the entrance, screen door still squeaking in resolute refrain from its last entrant. A simple heart whittled where a peephole might be.
She’s 5,374 miles from home— and Shay tells herself, popping a Malteser from her handbag with a harrowing crunch: she will find a way to live this life if it kills her.
“Hey, friend! I’m here for a… Chase McTuckus?”
She bares an appropriate approximation of teeth as soon as the receptionist appears from behind her falling hand: feigning the scribbled-on index card bares anything of the sort.
The Storybook’s receptionist is a Russian doll come to life, a friendly gnome outside a fairy garden, all round cheeks flustered ripe into the color of chrysanthemum. And the way she tosses a loose stapler asunder to hike her skirt up past her ankles, revealing whispers of shining mary janes and lace-cut aprons, to meet her half-way to the counter, makes Shay feel like she’s been planted into some beautiful, hitherto unheard-of fairytale. Or perhaps just a really, really well-executed tourism strategy.
“Y-yes! Already gave your partner your keys!” Already more cheerily than the past fifteen Brits she’s encountered. Shay’s heart lilts hopefully. “Just follow me this-a way, Miss—?”
But what comes next comes easy:
“Gwendolyn.” Like breathing. “Gwendolyn Bubbles.”
Shit. Forgot the accent.
“Just ‘ere on tourist assignment, luv. Might take a few pic-tures of the place lat-uh if ‘at’s alright wit’ you.”
Nailed it.
“Oh, m-more than alright!” The woman spares a gasp to herself. “On ‘assignment’. Oh, how exciting.”
And perhaps it’s the gasp, paired with the most seemingly earnest smile Shay’s seen in weeks, that makes the weight on her shoulders relieve just the slightest touch. The colors she wears seem not so monstrous. The mental image of mercenaries readying crossbows between the half-gaped skylight windows, not so vivid.
It’s no Ativan. But the TSA agents said it would have to do this time.
And just as she realizes there were no pages in her book about surviving crossbow blows to the head— down the rabbit hole, Alice in Wonderland follows.
An amalgamation of rounded doors better seen in Lord of the Rings than real life seem to spy her down as she passes. Garlands of plastic flora. Lazercut, papercut swan. A drooping plush doll of Willy Shakes himself, visibly rum-drunk on the job, supported by a makeshift mattress of folded towelettes. Or perhaps the housekeeping cart was the rehab facility, and Shay was truly so low as to judge a little, plush someone for trying to make a fresh start. Whimsical. What she’d be trying to get at through all her throngs of crudish makebelieve— was that the place was whimsical.
And in her neon colors and too many bags and too-tall-to-be-possible boots, she’s suddenly feeling extraordinarily out of place. Strikingly—
American.
“Lovely place ya got ‘ere, mate. Had ta check you lot out aft-uh that raving review Willy gave in As You Like It,” she rallies behind bouncing red locks. “‘‘I like this place’. Big words from a guy so famously succinct."
“Oh, no, he’s dead. H-he couldn't have—” She stops. Eyebrows furrow. “Joking. You’re joking.”
A reality Shay immediately regrets.
“Ha,” she pronounces politely. “Haha.”
And Shay begins to wonder just where that ‘wickedly dry English sense of humor’ is supposed to jut in.
“Oh, gosh, how rude of me. Miss Bubbles, would you like me to take your bags—“
But by the time she spins back, there’s already no point. They’ve reached the end of the hallway, a bright, brilliant number nine hinting whispers of rust at its golden edges in the smack dab center of the wood. Still, Little Red takes her pointer finger and thumb around the handle of her luggage and gently ushers it the remaining six inches to the door.
How considerate. Shay smiles.
“And I believe that’s all from me! Welcome to the Storybook Inn! Just let us know if there’s, ah, anything else we can do for you.”
“Actually, there is.” Offering her palm in a happy handshake. “What was your name? It’d be just the dog’s bollacks to be able to put a good word for you in the Zagat.”
“G-good lord, the Zagat! Now, there’s a ten-quid word!” Which Little Red turns from happy to ecstatic, mouth struck in a round ‘O’, met palm practically quivering with joy. “Ava. The name’s Ava!”
Hope. Crystallizing like ice at the edge of a window pane thousands and thousands of miles away from sunny Los Angeles.
“And, sorry, s-stupid question, but—”
But Shay doesn’t believe in stupid questions.
“I’m an open book, luv.”
“What… accent is that?”
Ava, the Storybook Inn receptionist and likely undercover fairy: too polite to resist crumpling her true expression into the confines of a tight envelope, mouth so-politely puckered, it’s become a sorry spec sat between two overwhelmingly red cheeks, the fervid color of blooming chrysanthemum.
She seems nice. And Shay likes nice.
“Fake.” Shay says with a smile. All-American. “It’s a pleasure to meet ya.”
Because when her new friend smiles back, it’s with wide, welcoming teeth, friendly caterpillar eyebrows, and those tell-tale wrinkles that crinkle around her eyes, that embroidery laced that means joy. Joy she can only hope is a genuine one. It’s only by the time the woman’s halfway back down the hallway that Shay wonders whether mercenaries don’t discriminate against human garden gnomes, either.
“Thank you, Ava!” She bellows back, a shred too late.
And thus, she is left alone. She stands there, meek and motionless. Like roadkill.
Are all doors in England so… big? Or is she just—
Shay’s hand hovers over to the knob, dread: inky black gelatin, drip-dripping gelatinous into the bottom of her stomach. She adjusts her feet. A gentle trill of her lips, a stretch, big face, little face, red leather, yellow—
Her teeth grind. Fingers on her right hand: flexing around nothing.
Suppose there’s no time like the present. Except for the thousand and one years before it.
Before Shay puts on a great,
Big,
Fake,
Smile,
And throws the motel door wide open.
“Good mo-ooornin’, ‘Thaniel!”
“New Girl.” Nathan coldly, conveniently replies.
The second time she meets Nathaniel Drake, he’s decked in cloudy day gray… which completely washes him out. That’s the first thing she notices. Cloudy day gray and a cocked hip that swings cooly to the side the second she clicks the door ajar, shoulders so broad and tense that you’d think him better android than human. Shay sneers as she unceremoniously scurries her suitcase to the finish line. Nobody in their right mind chooses to wear gray.
Which is precisely how she knows he isn’t.
Various songbirds flutter between the sweet streaks of sunlight peering from behind the linen curtains, all in perfect harmony with the white wicker and ballooning bedspreads of a room not much bigger than a college dorm. The floral comforters— vintage eighties, if she had to guess— are delightfully atrocious: pukingly salmon and teal and wide watercolor petals that make the bedframe’s exorbitant height that much more cruel. A perfect view of the motel’s picket-fenced side garden and maybe even a hint of direct sunlight if she can bribe (blackmail?) him for the corner spot. Somewhere amongst the dreamy visage, the buzz of a radio, and a droning news anchor lullabying off today’s top stories.
“—A local bus crash, off the A46, authorities are still scoping the scene for any casualti—"
Some future crowdstopper, swiftly cut off by Shay’s hand on the dial.
“—But take a chill pill, water signs, Jupiter Transit’s just around the corner—”
She sighs with relief. A springtime paradise, already a snapshot of peace, it would be. If it weren’t immediately smothered under Shay’s falling avalanche of clothes, colors exploding onto the empty bedspread and the sheer spotlight of sunlight like a spring of fresh, glowing dog piss.
THUMP.
“Woof!” She punctuates a-grin. “Oh, Nathaniel, you are just going to cuh-ream when you see what I brought this time around. Almost managed to sneak my authentic 16th century mace onboard, but the pigs at TSA said it might be a bomb. I said, ‘No, sir, this isn’t a bomb. It’s an authentic 16th century mace. Which would kill a considerably smaller portion of people should I choose to use it on the flight.’ To which, for some reason, they decided to confiscate it, which made no sense to me, but— hey, don’t get any funny ideas, Nathaniel; that codpiece is not for you… it’s for me— but I thought, only the best for the birthplace of the greatest playwright of all time—”
THUMP.
Second suitcase.
“And he is—“ Flop, flop, flop. Mt. Fi-jeans snows. “The best.”
But Shay stops when a tall shadow fee-fie-foes across the carpet beside her.
Nathan Drake stands there in his cloudy day grey: this terrible, cool-toned monstrosity that nearly pales his already sickly skin the color of Frankenstein. Shay has the heart to not tell him that just yet. Nevermind the courage. His great big blues glare disquietingly down at her. Broad shoulders hike. Arms twitch, as if trying, but failing, to hold back… something.
She offers a fawning smile.
Nice—
Like a pit bull, he said.
But just as her arms extend for the hopeful potentiality of nothing more than a lung-crushing hug, Nathan reaches forward… and plucks a little wooden manikin directly off the shelf behind her. Before plunging halfway across the room, stuffing it into his duffel bag, and returning haste to the important task of folding his tightly whiteys in half. Shay folds her dinky little arms away entirely.
Maybe all that height gave the guy impacted memory. Air’s probably thinner up there or something.
Shay sniffles. Itches her big toe against the side of her shoe.
“Didn’t Sully specifically request you put some meat on those bones?”
Nathan says nothing.
Tries again, a spit this time: “Gone a month and already you weigh five ounces soaking wet—“
“I do not—“
Yet when Nathan whiningly turns to face her, Shay’s already beside, holding up the little wooden mannikin to eyeline, soft features smooshed into a tutting vignette.
“Oh, this society… the toll it takes on the human form.“
Like a wake without the veil. She painstakingly drags and drags and drags its tiny, trembling, wooden feet along the mattress, one sorry centimeter after another. It stumbles, not strong enough. A gasp. The corner of Nathan’s lip twitches up.
“These vessels: so fragile. Our egos: only more so. Millions of years of perfected creation… reduced to rubble under the invention of the tabloid. Oh, Nathaniel, you had so much to live for—“
A lengthy pause as she squeaks each hinge into hands and knees position. A sudden, guttural wail.
“If only— I had eaten more— chicken tenders—” The voice: pretty spot on if she does say so herself. “Oh, room service, your poisons do be quick. Thus with a kiss, I die! Die, die, die—”
And she does. Say so herself. A wheeze of a dying breath. The mannikin ragdolls onto his comforter.
“Oh, god, Nathaniel—!”
“Want me to say a prayer?” Nathan smirks out.
“Nah, he was never much of a Jesus guy.”
But, perhaps as to be predicted, Nathan’s eye roll is the most applause Tiny Nate’s performance gets, wilted carcass tugged free with a yoink of his fingers halfway through a boxer brief. He looks at her. She looks at him.
“You know, you’re allowed to ask your friend for a hug. If you want.”
He looks at her. She looks at him.
And with those wide, unblinking, blue eyes, still laser-pointed into her own, Nathan takes a lengthy pause—
Squeak. SQUEAK.
And maneuvers that stiff, little carcass back to life, a ninety degree handshake uncertainly protruding into the space between.
She looks at him. He looks at her.
And what else can Shay possibly do, but reach out… and take it?
“Unfortunately for you, a handshake is sort of like a hug,” she says. “For hands. If you think about it.”
But when she turns for his, no doubt, gargantuan grin, Pretty Boy Blue isn’t even looking at her. In fact, he’s already halfway across the room, blankly staring out the window, midway through a single heartless fold before tossing some ugly shirt into the Tartarus pits of the dresser. Little Nate, dead on his back on the hardwood, stubby hand still cocked high like something else… stubby and cocked. She may as well not exist at all.
The back of her neck stings. She should probably unpack, too.
“Anyway.” — Which is as complete a sentence as any.
Shay’s hands scramble into the depths of Fort Spirit-Halloweena and plunk a hearty glob onto the dresser before sliding in beside him. She mitigates wrinkles like Moses through the Red Sea with a flick of her fingers. Maybe Sully won’t forget to raise her stipend like he promised next time. And maybe then they’ll have the money for a proper steamer.
It’s nice to finally have somewhere to actually wear all this.
”—the real question is, why can’t every number be today’s lucky numbers, Skip—”
”—a question I ask myself every morning in the mirror, Jen—”
A silence that just barely passes the metrics for comfortable slowly washes over the room. Shay wonders what names of the birds those calling songs belonged to past the semi-torn bug screen, twittering tweets and long, mourning coos like a deep breath you’re finally allowed to take. She’d ponder aloud if she wasn’t so sure he’d explode her with his mind.
Tweet-tweet-tweet.
And Shay stands quiet in that sparse stanch of linen-smuffled Stratford-Upon-Avon sunlight, too uneased to ask to draw back the shades, and wonders what the names of the native birds might be.
Tweet-tweet-tweet.
She got too busy researching how to break free of zip ties to look them up.
Tweet-tweet-tweet.
But it’s not like The Silent Wonder is any winning source of comfort. Still, she peeks over at him. Barely half a duffle bag’s worth of stuff sat sadly at his sneakers, with little else but a couple books and a gaggle of loose postcards to denote any hint of personality. Even in his personals, he’s made himself unreadable. Gray shirts, navy slacks, brown notebook. Without even a luggage tag that could reference any sort of interest he might have. Not even a sports team. Which, to Shay, wouldn’t count as a personality trait even if he did.
Everything about him says he prefers to be left alone.
“So, how was Nefertiti’s tomb?”
Which is precisely the reason she doesn’t.
“Oh,” Nathan’s dark voice goes uncharacteristically distant, dreamy. He shuffles a square shift of denim across the wood. “Um, client got a bullet to the neck somewhere in Bangladesh— unrelated— so the job ended up getting called off.”
It’d be a lie if Shay said her heart didn’t deflate at that.
“Oh. That’s too bad.” She says. “You didn’t go down, anyway?”
“Go down where?”
“To see Nefertiti.”
He stops folding. Hope: crystallizing against the glass. Shay’s chest swells terribly. Wonderfully.
But his only response is:
“Why on earth would I do that?” — Without even prying his eyes off the pane.
Somewhere in the distance, a windchime rings. The sunlight: slamming weak fists against the linen, before accepting fate and slipping beneath the clouds.
“I don’t know.” She replies. “I’ve never seen a thousand year old tomb before to say.”
Fingers: hugging each other between the polyester.
“Maybe she was lonely down there.”
Tweet-tweet-tweet. — Shadows dance as little talons take purchase beside the Maple leaves.
“They’re usually—” He gracelessly clears his throat. “Um, dusty. And pretty cramped. I doubt it would’ve been too interesting for you.”
She looks up at him. Searing. Certain.
“Everything’s interesting to me.”
Tweet-tweet-tweet. — Again. But there is no answer. A branch clacks! against the glass as the nameless bird takes flight.
He still doesn’t look back at her. The nape of her neck stings. Stupid.
Shay turns for her suitcase.
“Um—“ Yet, just as she does, his voice emerges from the trying ether. “Well, I guess, if I had to imagine it, it probably would have been…”
Shay’s ears perk up.
“Dusty.”
Huh.
“‘Dusty’,” she repeats. “It’s a miracle. The land of Shakespeare has made him a poet.”
And it’s most certainly not a smile, per say, that graces his face.
“Hey now, you pretend to enjoy my poetry, I pretend to enjoy your puppet show. That’s a better deal than most get in this business.”
“I don’t believe in pretend.”
“I don’t believe in orange pants.”
But it’s also almost certainly not not a smile.
“Touché,” she says.
“To—“ He stops himself, eyebrows furrowing. Shay’s smirk only grows wider. “Won’t torture me with all that again, I hope?”
“Nah.” Stubby nails, breaching back into her pools of color, as Nathan squints, waiting for her next insidious reveal. “I was thinking fuschia this time around.”
“Wha—?” A sound of horror. “Is that contagious?”
And Nathan Drake’s face— forehead pinched, mouth a-pout, big, blue eyes no longer piercing, but soft, longing, practically infantile in their whines for a color they never taught in history books was simply a warmish shade of magenta— is so odd, so silly, so strangely, unabashedly human, that the only thing Shay can honestly reply with is:
“Ya know, it’s actually kind of good to see you.”
His eyes dart and sway like rocking marbles. His mouth warbles. Considering. Before:
“Gee-whiz-Nathaniel-like-oh-my-god-it’s-so-totally-good-to-see-you.” — He bursts out shrillishly, wide, batting eyes he immediately rolls as he thunders off towards the not-so-distant bathroom. A pretty uninspired imitation. Surely he could do better with the proper teacher.
But Shay’s feeling the jet-lag too suddenly to argue for the contrary.
Stratford-Upon-Avon: even from their northward facing window, Shay can smell the water, the faintest of honeysuckle, fresh apple crumble baking for Sunday brunch from the pubs down the block as she finishes out the last few clumps of cloth with a swift shut of the drawer. She’s free to feast. The window at last yanks ajar on the second swipe— nearly rusted shut; old, synonym for antique, Shea thinks with a smile— and the smells, the tastes, the sounds of this wonderful, foreign land pour in like honey. She’s never had an apple crumble before. Perhaps this would be the perfect time to go out and get her first.
“So obnoxious.” — A muttering voice, echoing along the porcelain.
Something dark, molten curdles black at the bottom of her stomach. Her teeth grind.
“—Skip, listen up, this pertains to you— Virgo Venuses, personal relationships may be on the rocks the week of—”
But, then again— she thinks— maybe it’d just be better to lay down for a while, instead.
Her back hits the bed before Shay can even muster the shoes off her feet. She curls into her side, tries to inch herself into the single spot where the sunlight still reaches, pins her sight on the tree branches dangling and dipping outside her window, breeze sending them swaying like ships in a rocking sea. The wandering smell of rose bushes. Deceptive peace. Her stomach growls.
Feet padding back against the carpet. The click of a dial.
“—Next up, in Chipping Camden, a missing 19-year-old woman was found, buried in a—”
She has to buy another knife first. That piece of shit customs officer wouldn’t give the last one back.
Creeeeeeek.
Out of the corner of her eye, the bathroom door swings closed, crystal knob clacking against the white-smeared wood. Nathan, out for privacy: a criminal’s favorite. Yet the curiosity that blooms to life when the lock gives and squeaks a few inches ajar is not a malicious one. Her hearing stretches, her lungs hold, and she hears the faintest shuffle of paper on paper before his hands pluck up into her minute sliver of the cabinet mirror’s frame— and between his thumb and forefinger: a single bent postcard. It must just be the light that makes him look like he’s shaking.
But she’s not so sure whether or not it’s the light that makes his eyes look so haunted. So unblinking.
In a sudden scramble, he’s rushing forward to slip the postcard’s corner between the plastic and pane of the mirror. Stares darkly at it. Adjusts it. Pupils darting over haphazard. Tilts it back to the way it was. And Shay has to squint before she can fully make out the bold red letters printed across a cartoon cityscape.
GREETINGS FROM BOSTON!
DON’T BE A MASSHOLE!
But by the time she’s read it, she’s already been caught. Her eyes slink upward to catch his expression, that haunting look she can’t quite decipher, but most definitely wants to— before she’s met with his violent, blue eyes piercing back at her.
Oops. Her eyes snap shut and she releases a theatrically loud snore. Maybe he didn’t catch that.
And in spite of the way Shay actively forces her senses towards anything else but him— the shade of orange behind her sun-tinged eyelids, the honk of one of the River Avon’s resident geese, how fucking cold it is all of a sudden and how she should probably change out of her favorite skirt even if it is the same color as her jacket— she’s still pretty sure she hears an almost sort-of-chuckle coming from the bathroom.
Pretty sure. Sort of.
She twists her body away, back towards her measly spot of sunlight. Considers the possibility they sell pocket knives at the convenience store down the Warwick Road intersection. And if she’s brave about it, maybe she’ll go check before the sun sets.
She wraps her arms around herself.
And maybe if she’s lucky enough, if the world is kind enough, they’ll even have a pink one.
⋆⋆⋆
“—And yeah, we have an Old Globe in Cali, but that’s like a… replica. The one here is like… the real one. The Old Old Globe.”
Sullivan requested them at the Tudor World Museum on Sheep Street by noon sharp, but it’s already 12:23 PM by the time their shoes have even touched cobblestone. Three guesses whose fault that was.
“How amazing is that?” Shay gasps in delight, now billowing bloomers flared gaudy at her thighs, little lace-up boot heels click-clacking against the uneven street in desperate stride to meet Nathan’s own broad, unbreaking ones. He keeps his hands in his pockets and his purpose steady, gaze set on a swivel. He looks like he means business. She looks like one of Edgar Allen Poe’s lesser-known lovers.
The squint of Nathan Drake’s eyes between the sun belabor a scoff, but Shay ignores it with ease. They’re late-ish, but Sully surely won’t mind, and every time they pass a brightly-colored national flag or stained glass windows bordering some charming cafe or, heaven forbid, a tree, her feet drag and her eyes grow glazed. He replies only when she comes to a dead halt, chin high, enraptured by a sprinkling of bricked gable balconies above. Flowerbeds of peony and wildflower signaling a smart set of studio apartments. She ponders what kind of life the people who live up there could lead.
“You really think it’d be much different? If it’s a nearly exact replica?” Nathan pokes uncertainly.
Her face snaps back to his: “Yes.”
He only snorts with a shake of his head, “Alright, then.”
By the time their jaunts hiccup onto the Sheep Street curb, it’s 12:43. But her life is so perfect, and the world so kind, that upon their fashionably late entrance, Victor Sullivan will have nothing to give but the glowing platitudes of—
“You know the Old Globe is in London… right?”
“Oh,” she replies.
That doesn’t make any sense. All the museums are in Stratford. Shay swipes a thumb under her eye for loose mascara.
But whatever lingering doubts are crowded over by the sounds of milling feet. A children’s squeal permeates from one of the side courtyards. A park ranger’s whistle. The people of Stratford-Upon-Avon. Or, more accurately, the tourists. The tourists of Stratford-Upon-Avon.
Everything is dark wood and graying stone, the mystic smell of mildew, beer keg barrels in place of seating along the perimeter. Worn heel tread slipping on smooth stone. Quaint bridges rainbowing above the River Avon. The River Avon housing pencil thin sailboats and the occasional lover’s paddleboat between the seemingly endless assortment of geese. A rusting water fountain off the edge of Shakespeare’s Birthplace’s yellowing front end tries its best to break the illusion— but Shay’s love is impenetrable, and thus, she imagines puckish pixies stealing sips the moment their backs are turned.
Beside the ticket line, a balding middle-aged man clad in purple bloomers and the middling goatee sports a white quill betwixt his fist and speaks in booming speech to a variably invested crowd of elementary schoolers. At least one other person here decided to dress for the occasion. His nametag simply sports the name ‘Bill.’ Cute. Nathan scoffs without even taking his hands out of his pockets. Which is how Shay knows he must be noting the same.
Nathan swings over the ropes and takes a quick swerve into the ‘Early Years’ exhibit, with a twittering Shay, squeezing with apology through the ticket line, not far behind. Paradise, finally hers. But every attempt to linger across the path from large landscape paintings, glass-housed horseshoes, and ashen plagues abroad is stage-hooked by Nathan’s ushering hand around her shoulder. Shay smacks him away, without even the tiniest clip in her smile. She’s waited so long for this. She’s waited so long for this. She sighs, tiny fingers smudged against the glass cage of the Shakespeare family’s original chamber pot. Breath rattling in, breath pirouetting out. And damn anyone who tried to take her away from it again.
“Scoot. Sully said he’d meet us in the cottage.”
“Oh, okay.” — Peeling away towards the exit.
The building spits them out in a vast courtyard garden, but where Nathan books it with boarish legs down the pathway, Shay caves to catch every detail. An enchanting garden of evergreen, eggshell, periwinkle, and plum. Colors and scents, sweet and succulent. A quaint townhouse sticking out from the middle. And the color green. The color green. Oh god, the color green. Yet, gun to her head, Shay couldn’t tell you the scientific name of a single one. Only the fact that they were beautiful.
Botanical symmetry— only interrupted by the ominous signs plastered across the powerline poles for the midnight Tudor World Ghost Tour, barely illuminated by a grainy photo of a greying man holding a candlelit lantern to eye level. Or maybe the printer just ran out of ink. One of the most frightening effects of the occult.
“Did you see that? Most haunted building in Britain!” Shay shouts down the cobblestone, tiny boots pitter-pattering the gap closed. A nearby tourist stares. “You wanna check it out?”
“Haunted enough already, thanks.”
But Nathan’s squint-swivel the second his head breeches the cottage doorway proves an exercise in futility. The thick layer of cigar smoke is all the welcome sign they need.
“Well, look who decided to show up,” Victor Sullivan’s cool, gravelly voice sifts through the unwieldy haze before his face does, a single impatient sailor’s knot, crossed knee over knee, playing footsie with the air. “I was just about to call our client and let ‘em know our best agents have decided they would never dabble in something as common as money—”
“Please do not sit on the four hundred year old four-poster, sir.”
Sully immediately lurches to his feet.
“Geez, my apologies,” he grins innocently at the unamused volunteer, who scowls behind his spectacles, motioning to Nathan with the ash-hailing end. “Kid’s first day outta the home. Ya know how it—“
“No smoking inside the facilities, sir.”
“Well now, that’s just ridiculous.” The act: out the window, smashing his cigar butt into the four hundred year old cobblestone. “Jackass. How would a writer be expected to work under these conditions?”
“You’re a chip off the ol’ Narcotics Anonymous meeting, Victor.”
“I don’t remember raising you this rude,” already prodding at his chest with a fresh cigar from his pocket, slipping into the family kitchen. “Did I always raise you this rude?”
“Indubitably, Victor.” But the edge of Nathan’s lip, twitching curlingly at the corner, now that is most certainly a smile.
“Big word for such a little girl,” she murmurs.
“What?”
His lip falls. Shay goes silent.
The Shakespeare family home is a quainter abode than the plays suggest— stone walkways that dip a little too deep under her heels, crosshatch-paned windows overlooking the local watering hole and one too many crumpled chip bags, and wide, white alabaster walls, without sporting so much as a Nirvana poster between the mortar. A taxidermied rabbit hangs from its lucky foot off the top rim of the fireplace, sentenced the fate to be bled out indefinitely.
CLICK! Victor lights his cigar. An homage of bright red fire licks up every re-kempt scratch of stache. Chaos in every place he’s attempted an image of refinement. Shay and Nathan wait, transfixed.
“William Shakespeare. Born under the name Gulielmus Shakespeare in 1564, death by unknown causes 1616. Considered possibly the most prolific, most culturally-significant English playwright of all time.”
Grins, the lit tip flicks to the sky.
“A topic that makes you, kid, wildly underdressed.”
Shay snickers. Nathan makes visible revenge plans.
“Must be a happy accident I’m dressed for finding artifacts and not hosting fanclubs.” No one could ever say they’d seen someone prouder to be wearing khakis. “And, speaking of, what is it?”
Sully takes a hit. A drumroll of a silence.
“Shakespeare’s last remaining unfound manuscripts.”
“Wow.” — Shay fails to smother.
“The History of Cardenio and Love Labour’s Lost. Client is paying top dollar for a find like this.”
“Why wouldn’t they?” A scoff from Nathan’s side of the room. “It’s impossible.”
Sully smiles around the thing that kills him. Nathan half-heartedly rallies.
“So, what did they give us to go on?”
“Nothing.” — Victor says.
And the milling buzz of windowside tourists better can resemble nothing else but a swarm of chirping crickets in reply.
“Isn’t this going to be fun?”
He leans close. Secrets even the volunteers will never know.
“But here’s what your pappy Sullivan’s gathered. Love Labour’s Won: written sometime around 1595. History of Cardenio: 1613. That’s a pretty meaty gap, folks. We keep our visions broad and our options open. And, like hell, we’re ever the only ones after this, but for a whopping hundred million for each mint manuscript we can find—”
“They want these four hundred years old and in mint? Are they crazy—?”
Nathan jabs her with his elbow. Shay jabs him back double.
“I never said it’d be easy. But I never said it’d be impossible, either. Got connections with every major location in the city, and you kids got the wingspan. The trouble here is going to be looking for a needle in a haystack. That is, if the needle didn’t decompose in an Elizabethan trash bin four hundred years ago.”
The volunteer from the next room over shoots them the stink eye.
“But my best bet is that it’s not. And that it hasn’t.”
Yet Sully remains the pillar of composure. Impenetrable. Nathan passes an exceptionally cool sleeve across his nose.
“And something tells me there’s not enough waiting for either of you back home for that to be a dealbreaker.”
And Shay? Well, Shay doesn’t seem to be much of anything in comparison. Only a lost, twitching, meagerly-corseted creature, floundering thousands of miles away, inside a twelve by twelve box masquerading as a life. And that twelve by twelve foot box somewhere in the ether… throbs. Waiting for something to eat. To bury alongside it. Her blood goes cold.
“I’m going to take that lovely silence as an agreement to the terms.” And Victor Sullivan would almost be right on that count. “Nathan?”
Said individual’s eyebrows furrow too hard to hear.
“Drake?”
But there’s the starting pistol. Instantly, his head jumps to life like a car battery.
“Right.”
And somewhere in between the wrinkle of his brow and the start of his head—
“Victor, you touch base with your contacts at Anne Hathaway’s Cottage, The Globe, The Stratford Local Library, and Shakespeare’s Birthplace. Whoever’s been there the longest and isn’t showing clear signs of dementia.”
Nathan—
“Might wanna be flexible on the last bit,” Sully snorts.
Well—
“I’m flexible on the last bit,” cocking his head with a quickfire grin.
He changes.
“If they’re mint, we better hope to God it’s somewhere temperature and humidity controlled, away from sunlight. I’ll scan for any lesser-known reference books at the library and see if there’s any residential blueprints I can dig up. Scope out his burial at Trinity’s Church and finesse a brief layout of the security situation on the way back. We wanna keep our options open? That means we start at the start and end at the end. No quarto left unturned. Shakespeare’s personal life may be muddied, but we’re not gonna let previous historians’ personal theories be the reason we’re out two hundred mill this summer.”
Everything about him lifts. Gravity changes around him. Face frees. Eyes shine. His arms gain flight, hands: returned home from solid fists up to wild gesticulation. And Nathan— there’s no other way to put it— Nathan dances. Shay knows there should be a better way to describe it. There has to be. But there is not.
He doesn’t breathe. Instead, he presses, prods, beckons, teases, physically ushers the very air around them back into his lungs. Hands paint lines between imaginary points, press thumbtacks with every pointer. Shay can practically see the string. He becomes a conductor. But there is no music. Only him, and his heaps and heaps of plans and possibilities, that seem determined to go in one ear, and happily race out of the other.
“Plus four fifty quid. Motel rooms peak season don’t come cheap, ya know,” tapping his fresh cigar off the Shakespeare family kitchen table.
The next room over: “I’m gonna have to fine you for that, sir.”
“Plus whatever that guy charges me.”
And he does not breathe. Surely, he doesn’t.
“Plus the thirty pence for the toilet paper you use to wipe your ass with, Sully. But the library is free, and king of tax evasion or no, we’re gonna use every last resource we have available. Might even steal a sheep on the way back. Might even name it Willy.” Without even a pause to lilypad upon. “Point is: I don’t believe in mysteries. And if the client, and one of your mummified ex-mistresses, probably Anne Hathaway herself, says there’s a missing play out there, then that’s exactly what we’re going to find.”
Rather, the air decides to be there at the very moment he needs it. Easy. Innate.
“We are the frugal sort,” Sully shrugs. “Any chance Anne was a redhead?”
“If no other historian in all of human history has yet to know the answer to that question, Sully—” And Nathan Drake grins with the mouth of a person who has never done anything less. “It means we’ll be the first to find out.”
If only Shay was stupid enough to not know otherwise.
“Don’t worry, though, I’ll be here, making sure this museum is as thoroughly enjoyed as possible—” But whatever retreat she attempts is recalled by Nathan’s garage of a fist. “Hey, don’t touch me like—”
“Don’t be ridiculous.” And just as fast, gravity returns. Gaze: cold. Shoulders: cinderblock. An eye roll as he fishes into his pocket for a plastic card the color of blue. Freedom Pass. Britain Public Transit. The stuff she knows. Fret not. He still makes sure to sound as reluctant as possible: “You’re coming with.”
“Yay.” Trying, failing not to sound too excited. “I’m his human shield.”
Victor only chuckles in reply.
“Go get ‘im, kid.”
And when Shay makes contact with Nathan on the tail end, brutish body already gearing for the gift shop, the kiss of a nickname dancing at her ear, Nathan’s wide eyes and bobbing throat don’t even make it look like his heart just fell ten stories into his stomach.
Not even a little bit.
Not even at all.
⋆⋆⋆
STRATFORD-UPON-AVON:
PARTING IS SUCH SWEET SORROW...
(SO YE MAKE SURE TO VISIT AGAIN!)
“Wait… do I need a postcard?”
The now ten-person panini line audibly groans behind her.
“Sorry—” A meekish look to the rearview, before: “Nathaniel?”
Shay shouts towards the seating section, shoveling multiple travel size chip— sorry, crisp— bags under either arm. Just in case.
“Do I need a postcard?”
“Do you have the money for a postcard?” All Nathan gives in return is a wall of back.
“How many quarters could a Stratford-Upon-Avon postcard possibly cost?”
Why the ten-person panini line groans once more must just be that old-fashioned English sense of humor kicking in. The cafe makes little difference from the standard joe-and-croissant back home, but still Shay begged, practically on hands and knees, to break even from the path to Trinity Church, post a surprisingly productive (kleptomaniacal) trip to the local library. Nathan groaned beneath the bulk of his brand new leaflet-stuffed backpack— “What? His parents will buy him a new one!”— she needed anything but the caffeine. Shay didn’t argue.
Would look too suspicious otherwise.
By the time she’s made headway for the corner table, he’s already covered any space that could possibly go to her hypothetical croissant with books. Lucky for him, not so much for her, there is no croissant.
“Baptized 1564— Likely born two to three days before— Married in 1582— Shotgun wedding— First play written sometime between 1589 and 1591— Or 1590 and 1594— No, or 1585 and 1592— Stupid— Crap—” Finally swings his head up from a fearsome napkin scribble, foot tapping. “Where’s your food?”
“They wouldn't take my money.”
“Wanna try that again?” He tests, brow raised. His foot doesn’t stop tapping.
“I forgot to convert my money.”
“There it is.”
And with as polite a shove as she can muster, Shay inconspicuously clears off a quarter foot of tabletop, watching as Nathan’s focus sinks back to his napkin. Foot taps. The reason they named Thumper Thumper. A man clearly anywhere but here. He speeds on to a second napkin.
“First play performed— London— 1592— What is that?”
But Shay is no sleuth. His head darts up.
“Nothing.”
And she should be relieved, when Nathan only manages to nip the first book from her smuggled stack. A moment of silence as he reads the title, little wrinkles on his forehead furrowing like a loose piece of thread. Shay saddles the second into her bag.
“They spelled his name wrong.”
“No, they didn’t—” She rips it right back. Shrugging guiltily in gold foil: The Works of Mr. William Shakespear, Rowe Edition, Vol. 1.
“They forgot the ‘E’.”
“It was spelled multiple ways,” she murmurs forlornly.
“They should’ve had the foresight to know we’d only use the one,” practically ravaging his thumbnail with his teeth. He goes for a third napkin. Realizes he just went back for the first. Flips it over. “Stupid— Old Globe burns down— Cannonball gone wrong— 1613— Stupid, stupid—”
The heel of his palm clips self-punishingly into his forehead, once, twice, before slamming back down to hold his now-nearly tearing napkin steady. Shay’s brow furrows. She leans close.
“Where are you, Nathan—?” Goes for a gentle hand on the shoulder.
But the moment her skin makes contact, Nathan flinches like he’s been burned alive. When he looks up, the dark hollows around each eye, punctuation points under harsh fluorescents, make him look like he hasn’t slept in a month.
An abrupt, eerie smile punctures a hole in his head. Her stomach turns.
“Are you hungry?” — He speaks.
“Huh?”
“You look like you could use a danish.” Manic, from his throat. His body hops to life. “I’m gonna get you a danish.”
Even if she had money, Shay wouldn’t be buying it.
“There are danishes here, Nathaniel.”
Then, suddenly, certain, deadly:
“I’m gonna go get you the euros necessary for you to purchase goods and services.” Like it’s a threat or something. He gives a searing stare down at her. Nathan rocks to his feet. “Like a danish.”
“And then off to your mistress’s?”
“What?”
“Trinity?”
And in his widening eyes: something wet and wayward trembles. Manages to douse it just as fast. Guess he must’ve forgotten.
“Yeah, totally. Just, uh, stay here. Protect my books with your life. I’ll be right back.”
And at that pleasant declaration, the corner of Shay’s lip flits up. She sharply folds it back down.
“Whatever you say, Captain.” — Sweet as pie.
And for the final moment he maintains eye contact, it almost looks like Nathan does the same. Before he straightens up, gives a curt nod, and throws his body through the twin glass doors and off into the unfeeling English suburbia beyond, barely even stumbling off an uneven cobblestone one foot from the curb.
Shay watches him. Shay watches him. And Shay watches him until he becomes a blue speck, one with the overcast skyline. She glances for the books. Peeps for the slowly shifting panini line. Gives Pretty Boy Blue ample time to change his mind and storm right back in.
But luckily for her, he doesn’t.
She reaches into her pocket. Feels for her fistful of rumpled pound notes.
Hope: swelling in her stomach. The fingers on her right hand begin to twitch.
And without so much as a pause to lilypad upon, Shay goes for the door, looks left, peeks right, shoves through the glass, and books her pittering-pattering kitten heels down the opposite avenue.
Euros in the left. Clenching fist in the right.
Because when you’re surrounded by wolves, alone in the woods—
okay handsome ass motorcyclist gave me his fancy pass so I could go see the Indiana jones and the great circle panel the spirit of Sam and Nathan drake are alive in this Hilton tonight
but also it makes the "we're not those kids anymore. we're not. and we got nothing to prove." moment ring more warranted and more painful and not just nathan being a tone deaf little sack of shit
I just want to remind you that sometimes your life really doesn't begin until you are 26+... Romanticizing and obsessing over our youth is harmful. Growing up is beautiful. Discovering who you are and how you interact with the world is a gift. Maturing and learning what you truly want out of life and living in that purpose brings fulfillment and peace. Your life is not over in your early 20's because you haven't figured it out yet, it's just beginning.
a character who truly, legitimately goes “but why does that matter?” about their feelings when someone who cares about them asks. and the sudden falling of everyone around them’s faces as they realize that this person doesn’t recognize themself as someone who needs or should be taken care of. i want Everyone to hurt. surprise at the idea, worry for them, horror at not having noticed. do you see this person who doesn’t think of themselves as a person?
{Sam Drake x F!Reader} Chapter 20 | "Uncle Sam's an asshole."
Sam is doing his level best to inhabit the quiet domestic life for a night of babysitting - but the instincts that made him who he is refuse to stay dormant.
CW: Sickeningly sweet guardianship and a complete derailment of realistic timelines x
A/N: For all intents and purposes, Cassie is still an infant in the TSI timeline. Thank you. Please try to enjoy one very Sam-heavy chapter.
How does a sleeping baby manage to weigh roughly nothing and somehow also forty-five kilograms at once?
This is a question posed internally by Uncle Samuel Drake as his seven-month-old niece lies conked out on his chest.
She has been for the better part of ninety minutes; face mashed sideways into his sternum, one fist curled into the collar of his sweater, as though the grip is tethering her to whatever dreamscape babies sail through, a thin line of drool darkening the cotton. Every few minutes she does a little shuddering sigh, and each time she does it Sam stops breathing until she settles.
He's been lying half-reclined into the corner of Nathan's stupid comfortable couch, one arm a permanent brace across her back, the other switching between the TV remote and blonde wisps of hair, for long enough that the light through the window's gone from orange to navy.
He could move her. He's been told he can move her; his brother, halfway out the door with his wife and a face that hadn't looked that relaxed in weeks, had said:
"You can put her down in the crib, she'll be fine, you don't have to just -"
Sam had responded:
"Yeah, yeah, course."
And had subsequently not moved a muscle.
The TV mutters away adjacent to him, volume low, light flickering softly across the room. Not, for once, anything to do with deserts or dynasties or the cumbersome catalogue of his recent mistakes - just some BBC re-run from across the pond, a decade old at least: Hidden Killers of the Georgian Home.
Arsenic in the wallpaper, lead ground into face paint. Domestic poisons of people pottering cheerfully about houses and daily routines that were slowly wiping them out. Sam finds it oddly restful. There's something soothing about other people's catastrophes, especially the three-hundred-year-old kind that it's far too late to do anything about.
Across the room, on the little desk where Nathan does his admin and his spreadsheets and whatever other cryptic adult sorcery keeps this house upright, a small light glows: Sam's dead phone, plugged into the laptop by its umbilical cable, the recovery Nathan set running several hours back still grinding away. The photos'll still be on it even if the screen's cooked, his brother had said, ever the sentimental sibling, palm out for it. Lemme pull them off before you trash it. And Sam, who had wanted the photos with an intensity that made his palms sweat, had said:
"Sure."
Indifferent as anything, and had then checked on the little crawling progress bar roughly nine hundred times in the past two hours.
He breathes out slow. The presenter moves on to the horrors of Regency skincare. Sam lets her take him with her, gratefully, into a world where the only thing quietly poisoning anyone is their own wig as opposed to their expertise in self-sabotage.
The documentary can only hold him so long, though. Sam was never built for sitting still - just shy of five decades and the knack has never once taken - and after a while the enforced stillness starts to itch - nothing to do with his hands but hold a sleeping baby and thumb a remote. He shifts as far as a man pinned under an infant can shift, which is barely at all, and lets his eyes wander the dim room instead - the scatter cushions, the framed photos, a lone sudoku puzzle book marooned on the coffee table, soft clutter of a life that keeps its shape even when set down for five minutes.
Restless. He's restless, and there's nowhere to put it.
He sighs, gaze drifting towards the fridge. He counts the magnets; four, five, six - Hm.
There are, he happens to know, four bottles of something Belgian and overpriced in the door of his brother's refrigerator, bought for a barbecue that got rained off shortly after he'd 'come to stay', and they have been calling to Sam in the small hours since.
God, he's thirsty.
He weighs it up, turning his head to and from the kitchen.
Cassie sighs her tiny sigh against him once more. He stops breathing, head snapping back to face her. She settles. He starts again.
He is, technically, on duty. Sole charge of a tiny person who can't stand on her own legs with total confidence, and the responsible thing would be to drink water and stay sharp and be the kind of uncle who can be trusted not to - well... not to do most of the things Sam has historically done.
He looks down at the swirl of golden hair under his chin.
"Do you think," he hums into it, very quietly, "daddy'd get mad if Uncle Sam borrowed one of his beers?"
Cassie does not weigh in. She is, to her great credit, and his relief, a heavy and committed sleeper.
"Yeah." Sam nods slowly, at her compelling case. "That's what I thought. Alright. We won't tell him."
Getting up off a couch with a sleeping child on your chest is, it turns out, a feat of engineering that would have impressed the men who built the pyramids. Sam does it in stages, concentration plugged in as if he were defusing a small bomb: Hand cupped to the back of her skull, other arm scooping under, weight transferred, abdomen engaged, knees doing the work, breath held the entire time, every motion smoothed out to nothing so the up-down of standing reaches her as a gentle swell. She frowns in her sleep. Pouty top lip suckling at the lower.
"There she is," he breathes. "C'mon. We're on a heist."
He pads through to the kitchen, baby cradled high against his shoulder, flip flops near silent on the tile, and stands in the cold blue glow of the open fridge feeling like a burglar in a house where he's been sleeping.
Which is, he supposes, accurate enough.
He gets a bottle out one-handed, nudges the door shut with his hip, and then faces the tedious problem of the bottle opener. Three and a half weeks of eating here and he still opens the wrong drawer for a spoon.
Sam starts a cautious game of cupboard roulette. Top drawer: tea towels, a pizza cutter, an alarming density of those little bag-clip things. Second drawer: food menus, batteries, a lone lemon squeezer. Third drawer -
"Where the hell's your old man keep his - " Sam mutters, leaning to peer in. " - aha."
Bottle opener. He hooks it out, levers the cap off against the lip of the counter one-handed -
The cap pings free and hits the tile with a noise that, in the hush of the house, sounds like a tray of cutlery dropped off a great height.
"Shhh-"
Her whole body startles - arms flinging wide in an infant-reflex way that never quite leaves them - and her face screws up around a held breath, the gathering, the dreadful little silence before the storm, and Sam's already going, "No - no nono, hey, hey, it's okay, that was just-"
Too late.
The wail comes. Full, outraged, and astonishingly loud for something that fits in the crook of one arm - the kind of sound that bypasses the ears and goes straight for the cerebral cortex. Sam's whole body responds before his mind does, the bounce, the sway, the desperate jiggle-walk, the murmur, "okay, okay, I know, I know, I'm - ah, shi- uh - shhh-ugar."
It is not landing. She is winding up, not down, fists balled, face gone furious red, working her way toward the big leagues - and Sam, who has talked his way out of literal life-or-death scenarios, feels something close to actual fear prick at him.
"Okay - okay - hang on-" He yanks the fridge open again one-handed, casting around with the wild eyes of a person who doesn't know which wire to cut to defuse the bomb. Milk? Does he warm milk? He doesn't know how to warm milk because he wasn't listening to his sister-in-law - he doesn't know the temperature or - oh, thank god - his eyes snag on a box of those squeezy yogurt pouch things on the second shelf, the cartoon animal on the front grinning at him, and he lunges for one.
He hip-checks the fridge shut and beelines for the nearest chair going - Nathan's desk, in the corner of the dining end - beer in one fist, pouch in the other, howling baby against his shoulder, the whole operation about as graceful as a cartoon banana peel incident.
He drops into the desk chair, plonks Cassie down on the edge of the desk, braced upright against his forearm, gets the foil lid of the pouch between his teeth, twists it off, spits it somewhere into the dark, and presents the open pouch to the furious creature in front of him as his ears ring.
And, in a marvellous turn of events, she latches on and the wail cuts out mid-note.
Blessed, ringing silence, broken only by the rhythmic, deeply committed suck of a baby with her priorities firmly back in order. After a moment her free fist uncurls from the air, resuming its hold on his sweater.
"Thank God,"; Sam breathes, sagging back into the chair.
He gets his own drink to his mouth at last - a long, grateful, hard-won pull - and on the way down he taps the neck of the bottle gently against the foil of her pouch.
"Salute, bambina."
Cassie suckles, and stares at him.
She does the unblinking intense thing that babies do, fixing him over the top of the pouch with flat, somewhat solemn attention akin to a tiny judge weighing a sentence.
"What?" Sam says. "What. What do you want? Hm?" He takes another sip under the stare and she reaches up and, with a 'bah!', pats his jaw with a small, profoundly yogurty hand.
"Ugh - yeah- thank you. Okay. Okay." He huffs, scrubbing at the smear with the back of his wrist.
"How 'bout a… A story. You want a story? That I can do. Allegedly." He queries, sucking the yogurt off of his wrist.
He shifts the beer to the hand braced behind her, frees the other up, and clears his throat - and hits, immediately, a wall. What story? What story does a person tell a baby? His entire repertoire is heists and bar fights and three or four things still under active investigation in two countries.
"Right. Let's see, uh… Once upon a time, there was a - a princess." He scrambles, "In a big old castle. Lots'a… dresses, and -"
Cassie's face crumples. The bottom lip comes out around the pouch as the opening bars of a formal complaint start up from somewhere in her chest.
"Alright, alright, scrap that, scrap the princess, jeez, tough crowd -" He bounces her gently, heading the meltdown off at the pass. "Okay. Okay. How about… pirates."
The crumple pauses.
Sam freezes mid-bounce, wincing, every muscle braced, riding out the long half-second in which it could still go either way -
"A pirate. C'mon. You gotta do me a solid here, kid, pirates is all I've got."
The crumple reverses. The lip retracts. She resumes suckling, and watches him, provisionally willing to hear the man out.
"Right." Sam rolls his shoulders like he's stepping up to a mic. "Once upon a time, there was a pirate… uh… captain."
He checks her face - she's watching him, placid, contented, no sign of the wobble - and he gives a small, pleased pout, thoroughly encouraged by his own material.
"Dead handsome. Roguish. Bit of a legend up and down the coast."
Cassie gurgles wetly around the pouch.
"Oh, you laughin'? At the captain? That's slander, that is. Actionable." He pokes her tummy; she squirms, delighted, nearly losing the pouch.
"Anyway." The word comes out - and then stalls, because, hang on. Is he actually doing this? Is he genuinely about to take the single thing that's chewed him up worst in forty-odd years of eminently chewable material and repackage it as light infantile entertainment? With voices? A bedtime bit, out of his own personal screw-up?
"The… captain's got himself a first mate. Younger fella."
He glances down. Cassie gazes back up at him, pouch going steadily, not a care in her entire tiny world - and Sam decides that her happiness outranks his heartache tonight.
"And the two of 'em have got - " he reaches over and plucks a crumpled Chinese takeaway menu off the corner of the desk, holds it up like Exhibit A, then taps it matter-of-factly against the top of Cassie's head " - a treasure map. Big red X. Buried gold nobody's clapped eyes on in a hundred years. So off they sail to go dig it up."
He sweeps the beer hand in a slow arc across an imaginary horizon. Cassie's eyes track the bottle like a metronome.
"Miles of open sea. Days of it. And then one mornin', middle of nowhere, they're hangin' over the rail, lookin' at the dolphins and the little fishies and -" he gasps, big and theatrical; her eyes blow wide to match him "- up pops… a mermaid."
She coos.
"Yeah. Exactly. Big moment." He leans in, conspiratorial. "And this mermaid knows everything, Cass. Every reef, every current, where all the old wrecks went down. Takes one look at their scrappy little map and goes - " and here Sam pitches his voice up into a wavering falsetto " - oh, that? Yeah, I know exactly where that is. You're holdin' it upside down, by the way -"
A burble.
"Mm. Cheeky. Just like that." And there she is - the ambush of her, the way she surfaces now without warning or permission, that exact upside-down, by the way sitting behind his teeth in a voice that isn't the mermaid's at all - and something bittersweet tugs at the corner of his mouth, a smile that gets halfway up and stalls. Swallow it, he tells himself, swallow it, swallow it, swallow it -
He bops Cassie on the nose to knock it loose, chasing her startled giggle like a man grabbing for a handrail just as he's about to tumble down a flight of stairs.
"So," he clears his throat, "She asks if she can tag along. Help 'em find it." The grin slips a notch. "And the captain wants to say yes - God, he wants to, you've no idea - but he's got reservations. 'Cause the sea's her whole world, right, she's safe down there, but a pirate ship? That's… Swordfights. Storms. Cannons. And the men on it - they are not nice men, peanut. The captain knows exactly what kind of men they are, on account of the fact that he's the worst one."
He stops. Takes another swig to force himself to concentrate on the task at hand.
"Reservations. That's the word. He's got 'em."
Cassie smacks the pouch against the desk. He rescues it absently and hands it back.
"But she doesn't take no for an answer, this one. So she just - swims along. Right alongside the ship's hull, day in, day out, keepin' pace, chatterin' away, pointin' 'em the right heading, and there's not a thing the captain can do about it, 'cause she is very, very smart and very, very fun to have around, and he is, frankly, nowhere near as tough as he makes out." A beat. "And the silly old pirate, he - he gets attached. Which he is absolutely not supposed to. 'Cause she's down there in the water and he's up on the deck and there's always - " he holds finger and thumb a careful inch apart in front of her, jiggling so she clocks it "always gonna be this much between 'em. He can never quite reach her. And he tells himself that's for the best."
He looks at the gap between his finger and thumb a second too long, then drops the hand.
And an echo he's spent nigh on a month failing to evict picks its moment to re-surface: his own voice, ugly and cruel, telling her to go home. Go home. Like she was a stray he could shoo off a porch. Like she hadn't out-thought, out-worked and out-classed the pair of them since day one. He'd watched her face crumple, eyes glazing over with saddened shock of something landing harder than it was aimed - except that's the lie he tells himself, isn't it. It landed exactly where he aimed it. He'd wanted it to hurt enough to stick, and it had, and she'd stopped arguing, and at the time, he'd called that success.
Something sour turns over in his chest. He takes it out on the beer.
"You want my honest opinion, Cass?" he murmurs, eyeing up a small pool of yogurty bubbles loitering around her mouth. "The captain's an asshole." He clears his throat. "Uncle Sam's an asshole. Sorry to curse, but I'm just - layin' that out early, y'know, so you grow up with the right information. Straight from the horse's mouth, 'n' all that."
Cassie blows her biggest bubble yet. He dodges the splash zone.
"Glad you agree." He rallies, voice climbing back up, because there's a baby watching him and she wants the fun part. He scrolls the empty air, as if the next page is up there.
"Anyway. The treasure. This is the good bit -" and he's off, gesturing now with the whole free hand, the beer abandoned to the desk: an island shaped like a skull, a map that only shows itself by moonlight, a riddle scratched in a cave, a magical shell necklace, a chest that turns out to be cursed, and a sea-monster with - he leans right in and drops his voice - "forty arms," and Cassie shrieks and yanks him forward by a fistful of his sweater with surprising strength.
Sam carries gamely on, laughing at the state of his niece. "an' the mermaid, of course, knows know to tame it, 'cause she's the clever one."
Cassie delivers a long, burbling editorial.
"You're right. Total carry. The boys'd have drowned off the harbour wall day one without her -"
And right there, riding high on her own delight, Cassie throws her entire small self into a shriek of purest joy - an ear-splitting, gleeful, full-lunged scream of a noise, that makes Sam jump - and both chubby fists fly up.
Including the one holding the pouch.
Which she squeezes.
The remaining payload of strawberry yogurt exits the pouch in a coordinated arc, catching Sam squarely across one cheek and the jaw, before flinging a long glistening pink splodge across the lower half of Nathan's laptop screen.
"…thanks, sweetheart," Sam grimaces. He wipes his cheek with the back of his wrist and inspects it. "More of an apricot man, myself."
Cassie beams at him, radiant, thrilled to her marrow with her own work as she claps her hands, further dispersing little splatters of pink all over the place.
"Yeah," he finds himself licking yogurt off of his skin for the second time in the last five minutes, "you're real pleased. I can tell."
The laptop, jostled by the flailing, has woken. And there behind the smeared pink streak, the progress bar - the one he's watched crawling across several hours - has crept to a sliver from the end. Ninety-something per cent. Almost done - he's almost got his photos back.
And something in his chest does a bittersweet sort of twinge, familiar deep aching wearing gladness like a dusty cloak, and Sam scowls down at himself for it, irritated, because he'd really rather not, thanks, he was doing fine.
"…Right." He hauls himself upright, hitching Cassie onto his hip. "C'mon, disaster junior. Let's clean this up before papa revokes my visiting rights."
Fortunately for Sam, there's a tub of baby wipes on every flat surface in this house, and he's come to understand they are simply the native flora of the place. He plucks a handful from the closest pack near the kitchen sink, swipes the worst of the pink off his own face in the window's reflection - catches his own eye there for half a second, fresh out of dignity, a smear of yogurt on his jaw, a baby on his hip - and has, despite his best efforts, some feelings about it.
Because the treacherous part is that even he's able to admit that this is… nice. All of it. The baby on his hip, the warm hush of the house, nobody watching him - no one to read or be read by, nothing wanted off him but stories and a sweater to grab on to - and he feels less like a man on the run from his own reflection and more like someone who might, given a fair wind, be quietly getting his shit together. Maybe this is the life. Maybe it wouldn't be the worst thing in the world, being this. Uncle Sam. Beer thief. Teller of shitty pirate stories.
And then, right behind it, sharp as a stitch under the ribs: no. No, this isn't where he's meant to be. He misses it. He misses all of it - the heat, the hunt, the stupid ungodly hours, ruins by torchlight and documents by lamplight, coffee gone cold because he's too focused to drink it, and her. Her. Right there in the middle of every single frame of it, the way she's in the middle of everything now -
Oh, shut the fuck up, Samuel.
He hoists Cassie higher and heads back for the desk.
When they get back, the laptop's finished. The bar's gone. In its place, a folder sitting on the desktop, quietly holding the entire recovered photographic record of the last however-many years of Samuel Drake's slightly shit second-hand cell's life.
He sits and hazards a click on the folder… just to check.
Cassie gets re-perched on the edge of the desk, braced against his forearm, Sam working a fresh wipe one-handed over her sticky fists and her chin and the creases of her neck where dairy slop has somehow migrated.
"'Kay... Where were we." His attention is completely divided between his niece and the laptop screen as image thumbnails stutter in from the top. He clicks one half at random and there she is - and his thumb stalls on the trackpad for a second before he gets it going again.
"Right. The mermaid."
Cassie babbles a long, fond stream of nonsense at the screen.
"Yeah," Sam agrees, quieter. "Real pretty, huh?"
He carries on - half to the baby, half to himself - swiping slow through the roll with one hand while the other works the wipe over Cassie's fingers. Petra Palace breakfast. The scowl halfway up the 1,000 steps, green inky knuckles squeezing Scott's face into an expression of amused befuddlement. A blurry document behind glass. Her asleep on the train with a paperback collapsed on her chest. The narration thins out as he goes, the pirate captain quietly forgotten somewhere back near port… it's hard to do voices when your throat's gone tight in revolt.
"…an' then the mermaid," he tries, thumbing onto the next one - and it's the car rental place again, sunburnt cheeks, hands thrown up in a triumphant thumbs-up - "the mermaid rescues the whole - " and there he loses the thread entirely, because he's grinning down at the photo, and the sentence quietly dies where it stands.
A fat smear of drying yogurt sits square across the lower half of the screen, thankfully dragging him out of his stupor.
"…We'll make an artist outta you yet, peanut." He fishes the wipe back out, rolling up his sleeves. "Gimme a sec, we'll get her cleaned up."
It's her he means to wipe toward - but the yogurt's smeared lower across the frame, and clearing her means clearing all of it. So, in doing so, his eye snags on the other figure in the shot.
Scott. Off to the side, half-turned, caught not knowing the lens was on him. The backward glance. The smirk Sam clocked weeks ago and documented, without a second thought, as nothing but 'jealousy'.
He drags the wipe down through the drying strawberry smear, leaning in - not for Scott, not consciously, just to be sure he's got it all -
And the cloth comes away clean over the lower third of the frame, and Sam goes still.
Because it's not the smirk, nor the way his eyes are on her.
It's the pocket. The wipe's cleared the whole bottom of the shot, and there, in the side pocket of Scott's shorts where the low desert sun catches it -
"What's…"
Sam leans in, eyes squinting.
A loop of fine gold chain, spilled half out. And just above it, pressed into the linen, a shape stamped against the fabric. Scalloped - no… petalled.
His fingers fumble for the tiny magnifying glass on the screen, zooming in and dragging the pocket to the centre of the screen.
A floral impression.
Sam knows that shape. Has watched it sit against her collarbone for weeks on end. Watched it click home into an ostentatious box in a Cornish crypt - cut for the slot. And - unbidden, unhelpful, and absolutely not the time for it - his mind's eye recalls how he's watched it closer than that.
The night she'd kept it on after he'd stripped her down to precious little else, the intricate metalwork settled in the hollow of her throat, rising and falling with her breath, catching the lamplight every time she moved. He'd pressed his mouth to the skin beside it and the metal had been cool against his lip, warm on one edge where it had lain against her, and she'd cursed right into his hair - and he'd thought, absurdly, tenderly, in the middle of everything, that it suited her. That some things simply know where they belong.
The locket.
He stops wiping. Cassie keeps up her happy commentary against his side; he doesn't pay much attention to it.
Because the funny thing - the thing that lifts the hair on his forearms - is that Scott claimed to have found that locket in a townhouse in Wiltshire. Weeks after this. Sam knows the exact moment, because Sam was on the phone for it: four hours deep into a microfilm reel with his eyes gone to sandpaper, when Scott had called in from the road.
"There's a weird little necklace thing in the mix too. Looks old. Could be junk."
Could be junk.
And yet here it is. In his pocket. In the desert. Days - weeks before a Wiltshire townhouse Scott hadn't so much as set foot in.
"…Huh." Sam says, very quietly.
Cassie babbles up at him, a long burbling question, and he answers it on autopilot;
"You see that, Cass?" - already dragging the laptop square in front of him, the wipe abandoned in a sticky pinkish ball, two clumsy fingers finding the keys.
It's probably nothing. People misremember where they picked things up. He knows that, tells himself that - except Scott had that necklace before he ever said he did, and lied about it. It feels like a strange thing to lie about.
And Sam finds he very badly wants to know what else he doesn't know.
Call it boredom. Call it three and a half weeks of nothing to point himself at but booze and sex with strangers and a total lack of self-discipline. Call it… professional curiosity, perhaps. Muscle memory, the itch derived from spending his whole life pulling threads - call it anything, in fact, except what it is, which is that he was supposed to let this go. All of it. Him. Her. The inheritance, the whole shoddy mess of it - dropped, for the greater good of all three of them, that was the deal he made with himself in a parking lot in the Great British Rain.
But.
He types up his name two-fingered, hunched, Cassie supervising with a fresh fistful of his sweater: Scott Parker.
And Scott's… there. Real enough. A digital scattering of his career: an old dig-team photo, a name buried in an acknowledgements list on a thesis, a lapsed account or two, a tagged shot from some college alumni event. Ordinary. Findable. A man with a genuine, traceable, relatively unremarkable life. Nothing that prickles.
Which, somehow, only makes the necklace revelation nestle deeper into uncomfortable territory. Because a man with a pretty traceable life and nothing to hide had still… curated a lie about a locket for no reason on God's earth that Sam can see.
So he goes at it the way he goes at everything. Sideways, dirty, from underneath, the only way he's ever found anything worth finding.
Now, Sam's grasp of the internet is loose at best, but there is one thing a hundred grim motel-room searches for things that don't want finding have taught him: the good stuff never lives on page one.
Page one is for people selling you things. The primetime slot. The deeper you scroll - past the polish, past the ads, down into the unloved sediment of online drivel - the stranger and older the results get, and strange and old is exactly where Sam works best.
"Parker, Parker, Parker."
Because his whole life, by his own endless telling, has been this - chasing, digging, hunting, scrounging for scraps and making something out of nothing - Sam ends up where these things always end up, down in the digitised guts of old regional papers nobody's opened in thirty years.
Cassie, bored of the screen's silent nonsense, rediscovers the far more compelling terrain of her uncle's face. A small hand closes around his nose. Another finds purchase on his cheek and squeezes with proprietary confidence.
"Yep - thank you - very helpful," Sam mutters, dipping and weaving without ever taking his eyes off the screen, letting her mash his features around like dough - because his attention has narrowed to a single point now, and somewhere deep in his gut, a low hum has started revving up, climbing, and he couldn't tell you why, and it will not stop.
A scan loads onscreen. Grey, blotched, the column bleeding at the edges, the date along the top: 1994. An obituaries page of a local New South Wales tabloid. Sam's eyes track down it on reflex, the dear-departeds, the in-loving-memories, strangers' grief, left, right and centre; nothing, nothing -
Christopher Parker.
Sam stops.
He leans in.
PARKER, Christopher. Lost his life overseas, August 1994, aged 34 years. A man who spent his life chasing history across the globe, and who died doing what he loved. Dearly loved husband of Carly. Adored father of Scott and Kieran. In our hearts always.
He reads it twice. Then a third time, slower.
"Doin' what he loved?"
Sam sits back in Nathan's desk chair, lets a slow breath out through his nose, and looks at the grey little box of words.
So. There it is. Scott's dad. A man who chased history round the world, exactly like his boy went on to do, dead thirty years gone, when Scott would've been - what. A kid, maybe.
That's not… sinister, necessarily. That's just sad. That's a boy who lost his old man young and grew up to do the same dangerous thing that killed him, the way people do, salting the wound for the rest of their lives.
And maybe - Sam turns it over, wanting it to fit - maybe that's all the necklace ever was, too. Some heirloom. Some last thing of his father's he didn't fancy explaining to two acquaintances, didn't want the patronising sympathy or the hounding questions, so he tucked it into a story about a townhouse in Wiltshire to keep the whole thing light.
People do that. People lie to keep their grief to themselves. Sam would know.
Can't be anything untoward in a dead dad and a secret locket.
Can there?
He chews the inside of his lip, eyes still on the obituary.
"…What d'you reckon, peanut?" he murmurs.
Cassie, gnawing thoughtfully on his sleeve, offers no opinion.
"Yeah. Nah. Me neither."
Because 'doing what he loved' is the kind of thing you write when what he was actually doing doesn't bear writing down. Sam's read enough of those. Said enough of those, if he's honest, standing over enough holes in enough ground - he knows the performance of a tidy sentence laid gently over an untidy death; a tarpaulin laid over something you didn't want the family to see.
And the locket, and the little lie, and the boy who grew up and forged a career in the same thing that put his father in the ground - and who never once, in the better part of months of deserts and digs and beers and fist fights, so much as mentioned it -
It snags. Catches, like an oversized sleeve on a door handle, and yanks him back to reassess.
It's nothing he can put a name to yet. Nothing he could say out loud without feeling like a paranoid idiot. Just a low rumble starting up somewhere under his ribs, the one he's learned, over a tumultuous and questionably-spent life, never to ignore - the one that says look closer, look closer, you're missing something.
He shifts Cassie more securely into the crook of his arm, settles his elbows on the edge of Nathan's desk as she starts her best Chopin impression on the wood, and lets his two slowest fingers go hunting across the keys, spelling out the name that's set the whole thing buzzing.
C-H-R-I-S-T-O-P-H-E-R.
The cursor blinks, patient, in the empty white box.
And he starts to type.
P-A-R-K-E-R. Then, after a beat, the year of the obituary: 1-9-9-4 - D-E-A-T-H. Enter.
The first page is chaff - the living Christopher Parkers of the world, estate agents and rugby coaches and a chiropractor in Illinois - and Sam scrolls straight through them, down, down into the sediment, thumbing the trackpad with a knuckle while Cassie now works, frowning, at the Chinese menu.
And near the bottom, half-swallowed by a genealogy site that looks like it was built in the eighties, there's a link. Another scan. Another regional paper, the same August, and this one isn't an obituary.
It's a news piece.
The headline loads first, in tall smudged capitals across three columns:
NEW SOUTH WALES RESEARCHERS FOUND DEAD AT KASTROM MEFA'A RUINS.
Sam's eyes are already moving, fast, snatching fragments off the degraded scan the way you'd snatch things from a burning room -
…Christopher Parker, 34, an amateur antiquities enthusiast of Yamba's northern suburbs… discovered alongside Martha Anyango ------, 29, a postgraduate archaeological researcher… the pair are understood to have entered the ancient site without permit or supervision…
A young woman. Twenty-nine. A researcher. Clever, young, brought out to the desert on somebody else's watch -
He clicks open a new tab, typing in Kastrom Mefa'a, flicking back to the prior while it loads.
Something thwaps him gently across the mouth.
He blinks.
Cassie, having apparently reached the conclusion that his attention has wandered, is enthusiastically attempting to feed him the crumpled menu with a "brrrpptlfltt" of concentration. Every time he fails to open his mouth, she gives him another determined little swat with it.
"Yeah, alright."
He gently lowers the menu before she can chew a corner off it, hitches her a little higher on his hip, and turns back to the screen.
…local authorities confirmed the young woman died of a catastrophic haemorrhage; the cause of Mr Parker's injuries has not been made public… no other parties are being sought…
"Jesus…" He murmurs, clicking back to the new tab.
And there, slap bang at the top of the search results:
He can see, with a clarity that grabs his lungs and squeezes hard, her face grey under torchlight, her whole body shaking, her nose bleeding, time and time and time again - bleeding, horrific headaches, and how back in Chatham he'd carried her to the car and told himself it was the… travel, the heat, the near-death experience and the trauma of waking up beside a dead body, all, of course only worsening the original catalyst: that it was his fault for knocking her into that pool… and he never once took it back out to inspect-
A girl, just shy of thirty, a researcher, who went down into Umm ar-Rasas on Scott's father's treasure hunt and… bled… to death.
And three decades later Christopher Parker's son found himself another clever young girl, and took her to the exact same hole in the exact same ground -
And she... started feeling strange…
And… the necklace - the necklace, the thing that started this whole miserable late-night seminar - sits in the middle, sucking his attention in like a black hole, bending everything toward it. Because - run it again: if it's an important artifact, you don't lie about where it came from and then hang it round a colleague's neck for weeks. You keep it. In a box, in a safe, against your own sternum. Nobody launders a sentimental object through a fake Wiltshire townhouse just to hand it straight to the hired researcher like a party favour.
Unless the lie and the loan are a part of the same move.
He needs to call her. Now, tonight, this second - and he can't. The number lives in the brick on the end of the cable and nowhere else, least of all his head, and his phone is dead because he drowned it himself, wallowing in self-pity and fetid thoughts instead of just… checking.
And even if he conjured the number out of thin air - she wouldn't pick up. Why would she? The last thing he gave her was a horrible speech about her own good, right before she left... with him.
Oh.
Oh, shit.
The harbour, the rain, Scott jabbing a finger into his chest, and Sam's own words coming back to him: why else d'you drop the 'doctor' thing in my ear? He'd known it even then, mid-swing. Scott had been listening. Scott knew about the checkup - verbatim, early, had it ready, locked and loaded, and slid it into Sam's ear at precisely the angle guaranteed to blow the two of them apart.
He wasn't just stirring for sport. Not being a nosey prick with a penchant for drama. Aim. Scott wanted them in fragments. Wanted Sam out of the picture - needled him, wound him, handed him the grenade and stood well back - but wanted her to… stay?
It's backwards. You're running a treasure hunt, you keep the treasure hunter. The forger, the climber, the guy who's been shot at on four continents - that's the asset. The bright-eyed Masters student is the one you thank and put on a plane. Scott burned the veteran off the job to keep the girl.
Why? Why does he need her?
And then - God, and then - the other thing Scott said that morning surfaces. The thing Sam took a swing over and never once took apart:
"She found the cufflink that day instead. Again - progress."
Progress. A girl bleeding from the face out of the blue on a semi-weekly basis skips the doctor, and Scott calls it progress. Sam had heard callousness. Sam had been callous. But upon reflection, you don't call a concerning symptom progress unless the symptom is somehow part of the job.
Scott hadn't overlooked her getting worse. Scott was the only one of them paying proper attention.
Sam realises he's stopped talking out loud. Realises, too, that his arm has curled all the way around his niece, snug, like something in the room needs guarding - like he's not going to allow another precious girl slip out of safety - and there's nothing here but a laptop and a dead phone and thirty-year-old newsprint.
"Am I losin' it?" he asks Cassie, quietly. "Blink once for yes."
She stares at him with the unblinking candour of the small and sturdy.
He frowns deeper. Because there's one more thing, while the dominoes are toppling one by one. Amman. Scott barrelling into her hotel room soaked in sweat, wild-eyed, I was followed - and Sam had never seen him like that, before or since. Rattled. Properly frightened. Practically begging Sam, of all people, for reassurance. And Sam's not saying the tail wasn't real. He's got no evidence it wasn't real. What he's got is the shape of what happened after: nothing. Nobody ever showed. No second sighting, no break-in, no follow-up, not so much as a nervous glance over the shoulder - the terror of being involved in a potential chase or - God forbid, murder investigation, just evaporated over time, unmentioned, unexplained, and by the time the finds started landing in their laps; the ledger, the box, the letters, the scroll; Scott was back to wall-to-wall smirking and flirting and fucking encouraging her to do more and more, like the fear had done its job and been put away for winter.
No. Nah. That - that doesn't prove anything. He knows that. Frightened men calm down; threats fizzle; life's like that.
It just itches. Everything about the man, tonight, itches.
Sam is aware, distantly, of what all this looks like. He's watched other men do it - build mountains out of molehills because the alternative was admitting they just wanted a reason to call her. And some pathetic synapse within him puts its hand up and owns it: yeah. Maybe. Maybe he's cooking up a fantasy because fantasies give him permission to go back.
He looks up to the ceiling, huffing a breath.
Sam can't explain it. The feeling in his gut. He's not going to try tonight; the how of it is a problem for daylight, for research, for a man with more than two brain cells not currently on fire, and not in sole charge of an infant. All he knows is that every separate thing he's found tonight bends the same direction: that her, alone, with Scott, is no good thing.
A ridiculous notion. Sure.
He'll take ridiculous over wrong.
Sam is on his feet. The chair's cracked back against the wall and Cassie's clutched to his chest, startled, a small fist bunched in his collar, and the low hum under his ribs has evolved into a siren. Every instinct he owns standing straight up at once and screaming the same three words -
She's not safe.
She could be fine. That's the sane voice, somewhere at the back, ruling its objection - she could be home this very minute, dead asleep, phone on charge, a thousand miles from every type of Samuel Drake and Scott Parker and every hole in the ground they've ever loved. Could be.
But could be is a coin flip, and Sam has never once in his life let a coin land flat without looking.
Until he confirms it, she's anything but.
"Okay - okay - " He's already moving, away from the desk through the dark kitchen, Cassie jostling against his shoulder and starting to grumble, one big hand cupped to the back of her head on pure autopilot - "s'okay, peanut, s'okay, Uncle Sammy's just - " Where does Nathan keep the house phone. There's a house phone, he's seen it, a landline in this day and age, where's the damn - hallway. Hallway table. He barrels down the hall in the dark, snatches the handset off its cradle, stabs it awake with his thumb.
Dial tone. Beautiful, prehistoric dial tone.
Back to the desk, handset jammed between ear and shoulder, Cassie redistributed to one arm, two fingers already stabbing at the laptop: fox and fiddle pub bromley south east london. The results cough up half the foxes in the city - a Fox & Firkin, a Fiddler's Arms, a gastro-looking thing with the right name and none of the character - and he scrolls on a knuckle, squinting at thumbnails, until: there. Greeny-blue tiled frontage, hanging baskets gone leggy, the A-board with the chalk ghost of a hundred rewritten deals and soccer matches and happy hours. He'd started a fight at that bar. Got patched up in that cupboard. That's the one.
He does the maths on his fingers, hours leaping forward across an ocean. Late there. Last orders gone, lights coming up, some poor soul mopping, just like she was when he first encountered her in person - focus, Samuel - but somebody'll still be in, cashing up, and if there's a God at all it'll be her - and he can hear her voice and feel like the world's biggest, most fortunate idiot, and hang up, and breathe.
He dials the number off the screen. International charges be damned. It rings.
And only now - naturally, helpfully, with the line already live - does administrative panic arrive: what exactly is he going to say? Three and a half weeks of silence, an ocean of it, and his grand opening move is a phone call to her place of work at midnight like some -
The dial tone stops.
"Sorry, mate. We're closed. You can call back tomorrow." A man. Flat, tired, the clatter of glasses clinking somewhere close to him.
Not her. Sam's grip tightens on the handset. He exhales.
"Yeah - no, I know, sorry. I'm, uh, tryin' to reach one of your staff." And then he says her name. Out loud, for the first time in three and a half weeks - it comes out rougher than he means it to, like it snagged on something on the way up. "She workin' tonight?"
A pause. Long enough to hear the hum of a fridge, a chair going up on a table.
"…You taking the piss?"
Sam's stomach tips. "What? No, I - "
"Mate, she's not been in for weeks. No call, no text, nothing - number just goes straight to voicemail. I've had to cancel my holiday to cover her shifts because the boss is too tight to hire a newbie." A huff, more tired than unkind. "You find her, tell her she's got to get her arse back here. You a friend?"
Sam doesn't answer.
He can't. The phone's speaker has gone very far away and very loud all at once, his own pulse a sudden tidal wave rushing betweeen his ears - weeks, no call, no text, voicemail, and somewhere on the other side of the world a stranger is saying hello? …hello? into a phone that Sam's no longer holding to his ear so much as gripping like a guard rail on a crumbling ledge.
He hangs up. Stands there in the dark with his niece, white noise crackling down the phone, and the roar of blood rising into his head.
Weeks.
What has he done?
He didn't walk away - he was walked. Scott held the door, and Sam marched through it with his stupid ideas of nobility in his damn mouth, and left her standing there, ripe for picking, and-
He takes half a second to try and convince himself that she's simply gone off with Scott to spite him. But that's bullshit. She was always so careful about cooking up the perfect excuse. Far too considerate to leave even the job she hated high and dry.
What the fuck has he done?
Numbers. He needs numbers. A voice of reason. Victor's, maybe - which one? The man changes numbers like clothes. Chloe's? She knows Scott. The address book - Elena keeps an address book, some ugly floral thing, hallway drawer - he wrenches the drawer so hard it comes off its runner, random keys, takeout menus and rubber bands cascading over his feet, Cassie now crying in earnest against his neck.
"I know, sweetheart, I know - " he breathes, bouncing her, cradling the phone in the crook of his neck, punching in the first number his fingers dredge up, eyes wild in the dark, heart going like a fist on a door. It rings once. Twice.
Looks like you deactivated again, but I got your message (I'm here on work visa indefinitely!!! very exciting) and would love to see you. I just came back down south but have plenty of time to go back up. Please contact me on here or friend me on discord again and we can figure something out.
