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The Sadir Inheritance

{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.

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Word count: 7.7k

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:

Umm (ar) er-Rasas (Kastrom Mefa'a), Madaba, Jordan.

Sam feels his stomach give way.

A catastrophic haemorrhage.

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.

"C'mon," Sam whispers.

"C'mon, pick up. Pick up."

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