The Cob in Our Stars - Nathan Drake x Reader
Summary: Nathan Drake, resident babe and boyfriend of 3 and a half weeks, sneaks out of a top secret mission... to bring you a cup of corn and tajín. Many thanks to @durrtydawg for the es-quisite (get it?) title.
Fluff, as requested by @aimescoolkid.
Warning: NONE! A couple innocent kisses, some less innocent flirting. Fluffy as a tumblr user nathandrakeisabottom piece might ever be! Suggestive undertones and Sam cameo at the tail end.
God damn.
Because more elaborate thoughts are too heavy to breach the water’s surface. And if you tried to speak them, you’d taste nothing but the sting of chlorine.
A night alone at the motel, it’s a miracle in and of itself. After a whirlwinding first day in Merida that left you sweatlogged, brainfogged, and with more than a few new scars to show for it— nothing felt more earned than a dip in the clearest, most bluest pool that 400 pesos a night could buy. The water glows an alien cyan color, and you swear your toes start to buzz when you first dare them past the concrete rim, perhaps already anticipating some radioactive side effect. But then again, who’s to say an extra toe wouldn’t just make you run faster in the line of fire?
You sigh, relieved and molten, when the rest of your body follows. The southern hemisphere heat whimpers down your temple, down the back of your neck, a toxic lover leaving pepper-laced kisses so you have something to wash down the pool filter. Gasps wrack your chest once you guide yourself through a proper full-frontal baptism, breath barely making breaks in the thin waterfalls your hair halos over the water. But the douse of the heat, the kiss of relief, still and cool and calm and peace on a day your nose still haven’t forgotten the smell of gunpowder—
God damn, god damn, god damn.
“Hey—”
You jump, even when he speaks as softly as it’s possible for a human being to speak.
“Sorry—! Sorry, just, uh, thought I’d bring you something to eat before room service wrapped up for the night.”
Despite everything, you still feel the impulse to cover yourself. Perhaps it’s the exposure of it all, or just a residual shyness overstaying its welcome. Some infatuations never fade, you suppose.
Nathan Drake wears humility like a handsome curse— a trying corner of his mouth testing waters for a smile— all fairytale stories and daring escapes made small under a beige, over-shrunk raglan and the stray swipes of ash past his temple from a runaway mine cart. Even in his silences, he tells the world his stories. But the best ones, the yearning eyes, the anxious cat-cradled hands, his trips to the laundromat, jokes shared with the janitor, every tale he claims are boring (and couldn’t possibly be further from the truth), he always seemed to save for you.
He was a giver like that.
“Where’s Sam?” It’s a defense mechanism, you won’t deny that.
“Uh…” And the thing Nate never/always is: lost. “He’s still working on finding us a proper guide. All the big players worth their salt are gonna be trying to strike deals at La Rosa Roja’s midnight market tonight. He seemed to have it covered, so I just—”
“Isn’t that all the way downtown?”
“Um…” He stops his stride by the pool’s edge. “Yeah.”
You tell yourself it’s just the water’s glow that makes his face look so purple.
“Did you come all the way from downtown, Nate?”
“Um—”
A long silence laps at your feet. But it’s just the time it takes to remind yourself what colors make purple.
“You said you’d never had esquites before.” He says, like that’s sufficient explanation.
You feel sweltering again, despite the water so cool. Something in you even nature cannot calm. And you watch him. You watch Nate as his body shifts to meet yours, a self-conscious crumple of his too-long legs in the shorts he finally caved to wear after you wailed that heat exhaustion would’ve been such a lame way to die. But maybe the soft, pleading kiss after was the actual nail in the coffin.
“These are the good ones. Real good ones.” He casts his eyes down as he steps to join you by the water’s edge, cradling paper cups in either hand. “They don’t skimp out on the tajín like they do in America.”
It’s still early enough that the impulse for small talk rests uneasy at the back of your throat, but late enough to begin reconsidering whether the two of you really need it anymore. It had been three and a half weeks since the first confessional kiss, one last pre-death hurrah before the cave started to collapse… and Sam had defused the bomb only twenty seconds later. And while it was already fact to you, perhaps Nate was still working on believing he was just as interesting, just as beautiful when he wasn’t wasting time trying to prove it to you.
It’s hard to look anywhere else but him as you levy your hips up onto the ledge. Maybe it’s abject cruelty, self-fulfilling prophecy, the way his own timidity only magnetizes you more, the pool’s fluorescents reflecting off his bright blue eyes and turning his natural beauty into something dangerous. A fire your lips itch to smother, before they catch light and burn this whole motel down with you—
“Crap, hold on—” But he’s already scurrying up and away before you can so much as dare yourself forward.
There is something so easy, so beautiful about the way he moves. His own gait isn’t a stranger like it is for you. Physicality is home to him. He understands the world around him without even needing to see it. He moves like air over the uneven concrete, a dancer’s lunge toward a tree branch overhanging the fence, calves strong and yet movements impossibly graceful just the same, as he grasps a round shape in his hand amongst the leaves— plunging down only to let it playfully bob back up again. A smattering of leaves laid loose, as if unread love letters nature itself leaves for him to read.
Your lover returns with a single lime, vivid green and pleasantly bruised. Hands: physically worn and raked and rusted, but every motion, gentle, giving, articulate in its purpose. They look so lovely, so sweet as he unclips his pocket knife with a slide of his thumb across his belt, smoothly unfolds it, and presses its sharpest edge across the rough rind before sinking through. He makes even these quaint violences gentle.
The smell of citrus: he told you it’s what his brother missed most from prison.
Since then, he’d made a habit of keeping a bottle of limeade in the motel mini fridge. Said it was some Mesopotamia good luck charm like the liar that he was.
“Voila.” He procures satisfiedly, offering you the better half. “It’s your first time. Think it’s only right you do the honors.”
The paper cup, wafting steam and a happy mound of yellow, sits warm, waiting, in your swim-soaked lap— and you fiendishly fight not to compare the feeling to anything else. But while you’re still busy fumbling your single fruit slice, sliding with runoff, Nathan is already done with his, absentmindedly sucking the lime juice off his thumb and index fingers with a little else but a sweet, simple smile. His eyes, youthful, curious, never leave your own. Revenge, perhaps. And the man doesn’t seem to even think to do it. He just does it. Nathan Morgan just does things like that.
And with it, your life is ruined.
Maybe someone stupider would just call him polite, for not wanting to waste anything.
“Snack’s in the cup, pumpkin. Not up here.” Evil incarnate, the man of your dreams is. Smile like cinnamon.
“You know, for once in your life, you might actually be wrong about something.” Still, you bare a matching grin. And perhaps it's just your own sleep-deprived brain confusing one hunger for another, but something wholly not your own inspires your hand forward… and plucks his wrist to suck the remainder off yourself.
He’s never been great at hiding things. It’s why his brother’s the one who plays distraction.
Your tongue drifts languid over the pad of his thumb, and Nathan’s entire body seizes with a sigh-ish sound. ‘Whimper’ would be a more accurate term if you were crueler. He deflates so easily, directed, choreographed, given permission by a lament of your own. Because where there’s no room for it anywhere else in your shook-up life, there’s room for an hour in a cheap motel pool; there’s room now to take time. Perhaps it’s in a treasure hunter’s nature to be selfish, to take beauty for yourself.
Please, God, just this one man for yourself.
He chuckles an unconvincing laugh when you graze lower, twist him where you want him, pry the flat of your tongue into the gutters and valleys of his palm lines, where his rainwater collects. Even further now— dangerous, like him— and down the swell of his wrist; a surprise divot of another surprise scar. Somehow, you find yourself becoming more and more like each other with every passing day.
“What-something-me-am-wrong-about—?” But his inability to handle your ‘praise’ is all his own. His words: a gelatinous glob of grinning nothing. Just as quickly made sharp when you press a sudden bite into his palm. “Ah!”
“You’re gonna spoil my appetite, prettyboy.” A peck to his blushing cheek. “Gettin’ me all filled up with sugar so you can steal my food.”
“Humuna humana.” He treats his own hand like a dazzling artifact of its own, stiff and precarious as he fumbles blindly for his cup. He misses more than once. “You know, that’s Spanish for…”
His fingers find it. His mind, less so. And in the middle, you think you might almost maybe see him decide whether or not either of you need the quips anymore either.
He quirks a shy sideways smile. Shrugs uncertainly. And makes the decision you’d hoped he would.
“Something, I’m sure.”
“Something, I’m sure.” — You smile in turn.
And you’ll admit, maybe it’s a little awkward still, deciphering when and whether to go for it. How long do you let the eye contact linger first? Til’ you get bored (just scratch that one— an offensive impossibility), or til’ your corneas dry out? Do you still just inhale dinner mints every hour, on the hour, on the off chance the gentlest, most handsome, most out of your league goddamn camp counselor of a man decides he wants to take up professional spit swapping?
All these questions and more: to be left unanswered. Because your mind’s already ditched mission control in favor of less rational gods: his free hand, ushering itself softly around the back of your neck, and yours: to mirror. The next great mystery: who kisses who first, and whether or not it really matters. It begins as an awkward pitter-patter of clacking teeth and mislanding lips, chuckles puckered in desperate, failed attempts to re-right your mouth back to position— only to find yourself kissing teeth when he hisses out a laugh of his own. The back of his neck is warm, dewed with a shy sweat. The brunette hairs there, curled wet by Mother Nature’s humidity. His better breath: …perhaps a thing to be desired.
Yet these most human oddities are not a deterrent. In fact, they just might be anything but.
He makes a fluttering, soft squeak of sound when you immediately pull him back in for seconds. You’d sooner call yourself a seismograph the way you feel his shivers through your fingers. He’s an excellent escape artist, you won’t deny that. A man who’s made a living at hiding, whether behind monstera leaves or the crisp cut of a stolen suit. But here, in mundanity, in reality, he is as transparent as sunlight through a sheet of sketchbook.
“So—” And you itch to catch every ray that passes through. “The man of my dreams brought me corn.”
He blinks dumbly at you, lips still quasi-puckered, as soon the kiss breaks. For a moment, it’s as if you’ve spoken… one of the very few languages he doesn’t know.
“Wha— YES! Some clingy, stink-riddled man brought corn.” Nathan gestures vaguely. This close, his face has little defense to hide its hue. “Bon appetit.”
You raise your cup in a celebratory cheer. For his sake, you attempt to (unsuccessfully) smother your smile, but when you cave and trade your sight for his own, he’s only doing the same in return. The man who can’t play distraction. And so Nathan meets in the middle, a shrug of his wrist, and a swing of his strong jaw into an, at last, full-fledged, honest-to-god grin. Honesty looks so good on him.
But kindness: goddamn beautiful.
He motions again encouragingly. A single rat-tat-tat of his fingertail against the paper rim.
“After you.” And who would you be to deny him.
Bright yellow, sizzling mayo, and flakes of warm red pile headfirst into the welcoming curve of a plastic spoon. It’s a picture-perfect snapshot of a scoop. Too perfect to ruin, really. But Nathan always liked to say that life was meant to be lived, and beautiful things wouldn’t exist unless they were meant to be lived alongside. Something-something-Catholic-school-was-wrong. Because maybe the apple was meant to be eaten. And so you take your perfect, beautiful scoop, and funnel it past your oh-so-imperfect lips… and swoon.
A cacophony of sweetness and sour meld together into a dance of savory deliciousness. Crunchy and creamy and grainy and smooth, pebbles of tender corn sifted under vast sand dunes of cotija cheese, with nary else but the occasional cropping of cilantro to signal its meager ecosystem. Whoever invented this shit was a goddamn genius.
“Man, what a self-serving little rat, you are!” You mean to thank him, but that’s not what exactly comes out. “Stealing other people’s treasures when you already have one right— here—!”
You nuzzle your face into his neck halfway through bite three. And his equally mayo-covered chin trembles with the force of his forcibly-spurned giggles.
“H-Hey! I ack-oo-lee ‘aid ‘is time!” He garbles around a bite of corn, nearly kills himself on a premature swallow. “Small business—!”
“I couldn’t be prouder, prettyboy.” And so, you take the things he taught you in stride, and choose to live alongside the beautiful things. Even if it makes you both a little messy.
But then again, maybe the lesson falls flat, because when you both break away from another kiss… his blushing red, his tustled hair, his dots of cotija nestling against his bottom lip only seek to make him even more beautiful.
“HEY! Y’all bettuh not be playin’ ‘Hide the Elote’ while I’m gone.” And who is it but Sam, the infamous, the uncatchable, the older brother forever doomed to play catch-up while Nate is busy hiding your veggies between lovebites, who strides right through the motel gate. He bears a leather-bound journal sprouting business cards like mold spores and a sneering grin full of uneven teeth.
“Sa-am! Sorry, man, I just thought you’d— I didn’t mean to—”
“Oh, would you rather we do it now that you’re back?” But interrupting Nathan when the situation calls comes with the job description, your arms thrown asunder over his hills of shoulder and peppering kisses over his face so sweetly, so plentiful, it dawdles right up to the border of adorable and stomps it right into ‘sickly’ territory.
“She’s— she’s just kidding.” And yet Nathan’s fingers at your waist, tugging you closer, imply anything but. Timid with his words, wanting everywhere else.
Perhaps your lover was a better deceiver than you though.
“No, she’s not!” You reply in kind.
“Ha! YOU KIDS HAVE A GOOD NIGHT NOW!” And the last thing left of your unfortunate voyeur is a mountainous laugh and a warm ray of fluorescent light from the suit doorway (Nate chucks his used slice of lime at his head, misses terribly), before it slams shut forever, and you and Nathan are sealed in solitude.
The pool’s light against your lover’s eyes: blue, alien, yearning, perfect.
“Were… were you kidding?” Nathan asks, breath wafting with the scent of corn.
“Why don’t you find out, smartcookie?” And you can only pray it’s the same for him— and it’s the imperfections: the tussled hair, the blushing red, and the unmistakable scent of corn, that only make you all the more beautiful. “I would never rob you the pleasure of discovery.”
“I’ll take that as a bet.”
“Y yo espero que haces, mi amor. Yo espero que haces.”
⭑⭑⭑
