Fanfiction: After, Before (Uncharted, Nathan/Elena)
So apparently there's something about Uncharted 2 that makes me want to write embarrassingly gratuitous hurt/comfort.
Er, please enjoy this embarrassingly gratuitous hurt/comfort. Be aware that it is embarrassingly gratuitous hurt/comfort, to such an extent that I seriously considered titling it help help who is driving the train? (answer: the author's id).
Title: After, Before
Fandom: Uncharted
Rating: PG-13
Pairing: Nathan/Elena
Wordcount: 2,900
Summary: Elena finds Nathan after the crash.
Notes: Set during the second game.
As the train roars away from her, Nate clinging to its side, Elena sits with her hand on the wheel and thinks.
She could leave, now. She’s done her part. She doesn’t even know Chloe, and Nate is obviously crazy, as illustrated by (among other things) the fact that he thought it was a good idea to leap from a moving four-by-four onto a moving train. If she goes after them, she’s probably going to end up like Jeff (her throat constricts at the thought of him; God, she’s going to have to tell his family). Best not to get involved.
She’s already looking around for the best way to follow the train tracks, of course. She just feels she should at least acknowledge the reasons this is a bad idea.
-
There are bodies all the way along the tracks. She doesn’t think any of them are his.
-
Her legs are shaking as she stumbles away from the vehicle. She’s still alive, somehow, somehow, but now she’s out in the Himalayas on her own and she can see her breath rising in front of her and Nate is probably dead (how did the train end up like that? How did that happen?) and-
She has to pause for a moment, brace her hand on an overturned carriage and wait for her mind to come back into clear focus. Panicking isn’t going to help. She needs to keep looking. There’s still a chance he’s here.
Somehow.
She keeps going, trying to keep her balance as she makes her way through lopsided train carriages, and she’s about to give up (although she has no idea what she’s going to do then) when she hears a voice.
“Someone there?”
It’s faint - called weakly to begin with, made weaker by filtering through the walls of the train - but it’s definitely a voice. Elena goes very still, listening.
“If you’re here to kill me,” the voice says, “I wouldn’t even bother. It’s not looking good for me.”
“Nate?”
There’s a pause, and then, with a little more strength and a little less belief, “Elena?”
Elena hurries out of the carriage, and there he is, lying in the snow. She runs over to crouch next to him. “What happened? You’re covered in blood.”
“Oh,” he rasps, with a grimace that might have started out as an attempt at a grin, “am I? I hadn’t noticed.”
“Nate.”
For a moment he just lies there and breathes, his eyes half-closed. “The train crashed,” he says. “I had to climb back up; it was...” He makes a vague, clumsy motion with his arms. “Over the edge of the cliff. And I - I think I was shot.”
“My God,” Elena whispers. She stays crouched for a moment, watching him, thinking. “You have to get up; you’ll freeze to death if you stay here.”
Nate frowns. His voice sounds strange, crackly, like it’s coming through a poorly-tuned radio. “I have to get up?”
“I’m sorry,” Elena says. “I know you’re hurt. But I’m not letting you die out here.”
Nate’s fingers twitch against the snow-smothered ground. His skin looks very pale. When he speaks, his voice is a little clearer, a little more lucid. “Tell me you still have the truck.”
Elena hesitates.
-
There are long skidmarks through the snow and across the ice beneath, leading them up to the truck, its front flattened against the wrecked train. What remains of its windshield is already opaque with snow. Elena feels sick just looking at it, her mind involuntarily replaying the entire scene: losing control, the side of the train barrelling up, the clear flash of knowing that she was about to die-
“Does that thing still drive?” Nate asks from beside her. She has both arms around him, supporting him; his arm is draped heavily across her shoulders. His bare forearm is pressed against the side of her neck. His skin is freezing, no warmth at all, like she’s carrying an ice sculpture, or a corpse.
She’s answered the question twice already, and she winces at having to answer it again. “No,” she says. “But it’s shelter, kind of. And there’s a first-aid kit in there.”
Nate doesn’t respond, and she turns her head to see him staring blankly at the truck, his eyes glazed over and confused. She has no idea whether she’s taking in anything she’s saying at all.
Does he even really know she’s here? Does he think this is just a hallucination?
Maybe she’s hallucinating. Maybe Nate is fine and Jeff is fine and they never decided to do the stupid piece on Lazarević. That’d be nice.
“C’mon,” she says, giving him the gentlest possible shake. “We’ll take a look at that gunshot, get you patched up, okay?”
“Mm,” Nate says. He looks at her.
“You’ll be fine,” she says, because it has to be true.
He keeps looking at her, draws the arm around her shoulders back a little. He reaches out with his other hand to brush a strand of her hair back from her cheek, but the cold has made his movements stiff and he almost catches her in the eye.
It takes Elena a moment to remember she’s supposed to be breathing.
“Elena,” he says, his fingers cold on the back of her neck. “Elena,” and he leans in to-
Elena pulls away, with a nervous laugh. “You’re delirious.”
They carry on toward the truck, and Elena doesn’t turn to look at him again. The snowflakes are probably melting the moment they touch her.
-
Fires have broken out at points along the wreckage of the train, and Elena helps Nate over to one of the burning sections so she can make a start on treating his wound, not only for the extra light of the fire but because she can’t exactly do any delicate work when her hands feel like two blocks of ice clumsily stapled to her forearms.
There was a blanket in the truck as well, thankfully, foil-lined so she doesn’t need to worry about getting it wet through; the people around here obviously know to be prepared for the mountains. Getting everything set up is tricky when she has Nate leaning on her; she has to drop the first-aid kit into the snow and then shrug the blanket off her shoulders and kick it out flat as best she can.
Nate mumbles something incoherent as she eases him down to lie on the blanket. It sounds a bit like ‘be gentle with me, Mistress’.
She warms her fingers until they feel slightly more as if they belong to her, and then she crouches and carefully lifts up Nate’s bloodstained shirt. It’s heavy, crusted to his skin, and so much of his blood has seeped into her own clothes by now that an observer would probably have trouble guessing which of them has been shot. She draws in a sharp breath at the sight of the wound.
“Nate?” she asks. “Something tells me you’ll know more about this than I do.”
Nate frowns. “What, you don’t know how to treat a bullet wound?”
Elena raises her eyebrows. “I’m a journalist. I’m not some kind of secret agent.”
“I mean, I’d have thought you’d have looked it up after last time.”
It’s amazing he doesn’t end up with a bullet in his abdomen more often, really. “I thought my days of getting shot at were over,” she says. “Didn’t count on running into you again. Do people try to kill you in every country you visit?”
“Just most of ’em.” He winces, coughs. “Uh, okay, don’t try to take the bullet out. It’s not that I don’t trust you-”
“Yeah, I’m incredibly offended,” Elena says, looking through the first-aid kid. “So, what, I should just try to stop the bleeding?”
Nate doesn’t answer her; he’s still conscious when she glances back at him, but he doesn’t really seem aware that she just asked him a question. Still, they seemed to be having a lucid conversation for a moment. That’s encouraging.
There are pads and bandages and ice packs in the kit, although she doubts the last will really be necessary, and, well, it seems unlikely that trying to stop the bleeding will make things worse.
-
“Nate?” she asks, quietly, his blood drying on her fingers. She has to say it again before he blinks and turns his head to focus on her. “How do you feel?”
It takes Nate a while to answer, like he’s on the other end of a slow video connection. “Kind of like I’ve just been shot,” he says, eventually.
Not exactly what she was hoping for. “Do you also feel like someone’s cleaned it and bandaged it and maybe not completely screwed it up?”
Nate blinks again, raises his head to look down his body, awkwardly brushes the pad bandaged against his wound with his fingertips. “Thanks,” he says, after another long pause. He might be trying to smile; it’s difficult to tell. “I guess I do feel a little like that.”
-
Nate sleeps on a bed of torn-up train upholstery in the back of the truck, the blanket draped over the open top like a tarpaulin. Elena sits in the driver’s seat; the passenger side has mostly caved in. She doesn’t sleep.
-
They sit in front of a dying fire with their shoulders pressed together, the blanket draped over their heads and backs. Elena wishes the truck had a working heater. She wishes she hadn’t lost control. She doesn’t quite wish that she hadn’t followed the train in the first place, because the idea of Nate lying here and slowly bleeding to death on his own makes her feel ill, but she’s very close to it.
They should never have gone through with this train plan. Jeff was killed. They should have recognised what they were up against; they should have gone home. But no, Nathan Drake had to be stupid and noble and stupid-
And she had to be equally stupid and go after him, and even now she can’t say for certain she wouldn’t do it again. She can’t blame him for this.
“I don’t want you to think I’m ungrateful,” Nate says, coughing, “but if this was meant to be a rescue mission it could’ve gone better.”
Elena’s been thinking the same thing herself. She considers making a snide remark in response.
“I’m sorry,” she says instead, after a moment. “If we both die.”
Nate frowns. “We’re not both gonna die. Why would we both die? You’re not hurt. You could walk back out of here. Might take you a while, but you could do it.”
Elena starts to speak, but Nate cuts her off.
“You should do it,” he says, his voice becoming clearer with realisation. “You should leave right now if you want to make it. Why are you even still here?”
“I’m not leaving without you.”
“Elena, don’t do this ridiculous self-sacrificing thing, please.”
Elena stares. “Oh, yes, I’m being ridiculous and self-sacrificing.”
Nate looks puzzled for a moment, then laughs. “Yeah, okay, you’ve got a point.”
Maybe she should leave. Moving is already beginning to feel strange, her muscles half-paralysed with cold. She’d like to be able to give him more time to heal, but this isn’t exactly the best place for recovery. They need to get out of here while she’s still healthy enough to support him.
Elena stands, pulling the blanket around her shoulders (“Hey!” Nate protests), squinting in the direction they came from. The sky is dark and the snow is falling thick and she’s never been so hungry in her life. “We’re gonna have to walk back along the tracks.”
“Both of us?” he asks. “I’ll slow you down. Long way back to civilisation.”
“Yeah, but it’ll be even longer if we just sit here.” She ducks to pull his arm over her shoulders and straightens up, half-dragging him to his feet. “C’mon, we can make it.”
Nate winces, giving a hiss of pain. Elena puts her arms around him, clasping both hands tightly over his bandaged wound, and they take their first stumbling steps back the way they came.
-
She doesn’t know how long they’ve been walking. It feels like hours, but the featureless landscape and the close-falling snow all around them makes it look like they haven’t moved at all. Her cheeks are freezing, and the cold air is scraping out her lungs, and Nate seems to be becoming heavier, somehow.
“We’re doing great,” she says, quietly. “Just keep going.”
They only make it a few steps farther.
Nate stumbles and falls, knocking them both down into the snow. He rolls onto his back with a groan of pain. Elena pushes herself to her hands and knees to see that at some point his wound has started bleeding again; his shirt got hiked up as he fell, and the pad and bandage underneath are soaked through. There’s fresh blood in the snow when she lifts her hands away.
She should have given it more time before they started walking. Of course it hadn’t healed enough to hold. Stupid. She’d been so worried that they’d become too weak to make it if they waited.
Elena shifts herself to sit next to him, hugging her knees to her chest. “Nate?”
He sounds like he’s on the other side of thick glass. “Elena, I’m sorry, I’m sorry, I can’t go on. I’ll just bleed out and die and then you’ll be stuck with my big stupid corpse.”
“You’ll die if you stay here,” she says.
“You need to keep going.”
“Not without you.”
“Damn it, Elena-”
“I’m not just going to lie down and die next to you,” she says. She has to be practical, after all. She still has a life and a job and people who care about her, even if Nate is right, even if this is his last adventure. “I’ll go. But not while I know you’re alive.”
He laughs a little, but it’s kind of cut off and strangled by his breathing, too fast and too shallow. “What, so you’re just gonna sit here and watch me die like some kind of vulture?”
It’s an effort to smile. “I’m sure there’s a better way to put that.”
“Some kind of beautiful vulture,” he says. “Some kind of gorgeous, amazing vulture.” He struggles up to a sitting position and just looks at her for a while before speaking again. “It was really good to see you again, you know.”
This all feels uncomfortably sincere. Then again, if you can’t be sincere in the Himalayas when one of you is bleeding to death, when can you be sincere?
“You’d better miss me,” he says, with a trace of a grin.
Elena kisses him.
He moves to touch her face after a moment; his hand is damp and covered in snow. His lips are cold but his mouth is warm, the only warm thing about him, and Elena feels something in her relax; she hadn’t realised it until now, but this is the first moment since she found him that she’s really been able to make herself believe he’s still alive.
“Hang on, okay?” she whispers, stroking his hair. “Maybe a train will come.”
Nate presses his head against her collarbone and closes his eyes.
-
A train doesn’t come.
She should leave. She should go and get out of here and make sure that one of them, at least, survives this. But she can’t make herself, not when she has Nate lying with his head in her lap, sleeping or unconscious.
There’s a faint rustle and crunch, muffled by the falling snow, and at first she thinks she’s imagining it. She goes still, listening very hard.
There’s another faint crunch, and another. Like footsteps. Like someone’s walking through the snow nearby.
She’s dreaming.
“Hello?” she calls, but her voice is quieter than she was trying for and cracks halfway through the word and she has to try again. “Hello?”
The footsteps stop, and she thinks she might hear someone call something in response, but it’s too muffled to make out, or perhaps it’s in a language she doesn’t understand. She focuses on the direction the voice came from, trying to see through the blur of snow.
It might just be a shadow, but...
Elena eases Nate’s head off her lap, carefully, and crawls a little closer to the figure. If it’s a shadow, it isn’t hers. It looks like it’s standing. It doesn’t move when she does.
It could still be a hallucination. Worse, it could be one of Lazarević’s men, although she can’t imagine they’ll really care about killing Nate if they’ve been stranded in the train crash as well.
But it could be someone who can help.
Elena struggles to her feet and runs as fast as she can manage through the thickening snow.
Er, please enjoy this embarrassingly gratuitous hurt/comfort. Be aware that it is embarrassingly gratuitous hurt/comfort, to such an extent that I seriously considered titling it help help who is driving the train? (answer: the author's id).
Title: After, Before
Fandom: Uncharted
Rating: PG-13
Pairing: Nathan/Elena
Wordcount: 2,900
Summary: Elena finds Nathan after the crash.
Notes: Set during the second game.
As the train roars away from her, Nate clinging to its side, Elena sits with her hand on the wheel and thinks.
She could leave, now. She’s done her part. She doesn’t even know Chloe, and Nate is obviously crazy, as illustrated by (among other things) the fact that he thought it was a good idea to leap from a moving four-by-four onto a moving train. If she goes after them, she’s probably going to end up like Jeff (her throat constricts at the thought of him; God, she’s going to have to tell his family). Best not to get involved.
She’s already looking around for the best way to follow the train tracks, of course. She just feels she should at least acknowledge the reasons this is a bad idea.
-
There are bodies all the way along the tracks. She doesn’t think any of them are his.
-
Her legs are shaking as she stumbles away from the vehicle. She’s still alive, somehow, somehow, but now she’s out in the Himalayas on her own and she can see her breath rising in front of her and Nate is probably dead (how did the train end up like that? How did that happen?) and-
She has to pause for a moment, brace her hand on an overturned carriage and wait for her mind to come back into clear focus. Panicking isn’t going to help. She needs to keep looking. There’s still a chance he’s here.
Somehow.
She keeps going, trying to keep her balance as she makes her way through lopsided train carriages, and she’s about to give up (although she has no idea what she’s going to do then) when she hears a voice.
“Someone there?”
It’s faint - called weakly to begin with, made weaker by filtering through the walls of the train - but it’s definitely a voice. Elena goes very still, listening.
“If you’re here to kill me,” the voice says, “I wouldn’t even bother. It’s not looking good for me.”
“Nate?”
There’s a pause, and then, with a little more strength and a little less belief, “Elena?”
Elena hurries out of the carriage, and there he is, lying in the snow. She runs over to crouch next to him. “What happened? You’re covered in blood.”
“Oh,” he rasps, with a grimace that might have started out as an attempt at a grin, “am I? I hadn’t noticed.”
“Nate.”
For a moment he just lies there and breathes, his eyes half-closed. “The train crashed,” he says. “I had to climb back up; it was...” He makes a vague, clumsy motion with his arms. “Over the edge of the cliff. And I - I think I was shot.”
“My God,” Elena whispers. She stays crouched for a moment, watching him, thinking. “You have to get up; you’ll freeze to death if you stay here.”
Nate frowns. His voice sounds strange, crackly, like it’s coming through a poorly-tuned radio. “I have to get up?”
“I’m sorry,” Elena says. “I know you’re hurt. But I’m not letting you die out here.”
Nate’s fingers twitch against the snow-smothered ground. His skin looks very pale. When he speaks, his voice is a little clearer, a little more lucid. “Tell me you still have the truck.”
Elena hesitates.
-
There are long skidmarks through the snow and across the ice beneath, leading them up to the truck, its front flattened against the wrecked train. What remains of its windshield is already opaque with snow. Elena feels sick just looking at it, her mind involuntarily replaying the entire scene: losing control, the side of the train barrelling up, the clear flash of knowing that she was about to die-
“Does that thing still drive?” Nate asks from beside her. She has both arms around him, supporting him; his arm is draped heavily across her shoulders. His bare forearm is pressed against the side of her neck. His skin is freezing, no warmth at all, like she’s carrying an ice sculpture, or a corpse.
She’s answered the question twice already, and she winces at having to answer it again. “No,” she says. “But it’s shelter, kind of. And there’s a first-aid kit in there.”
Nate doesn’t respond, and she turns her head to see him staring blankly at the truck, his eyes glazed over and confused. She has no idea whether she’s taking in anything she’s saying at all.
Does he even really know she’s here? Does he think this is just a hallucination?
Maybe she’s hallucinating. Maybe Nate is fine and Jeff is fine and they never decided to do the stupid piece on Lazarević. That’d be nice.
“C’mon,” she says, giving him the gentlest possible shake. “We’ll take a look at that gunshot, get you patched up, okay?”
“Mm,” Nate says. He looks at her.
“You’ll be fine,” she says, because it has to be true.
He keeps looking at her, draws the arm around her shoulders back a little. He reaches out with his other hand to brush a strand of her hair back from her cheek, but the cold has made his movements stiff and he almost catches her in the eye.
It takes Elena a moment to remember she’s supposed to be breathing.
“Elena,” he says, his fingers cold on the back of her neck. “Elena,” and he leans in to-
Elena pulls away, with a nervous laugh. “You’re delirious.”
They carry on toward the truck, and Elena doesn’t turn to look at him again. The snowflakes are probably melting the moment they touch her.
-
Fires have broken out at points along the wreckage of the train, and Elena helps Nate over to one of the burning sections so she can make a start on treating his wound, not only for the extra light of the fire but because she can’t exactly do any delicate work when her hands feel like two blocks of ice clumsily stapled to her forearms.
There was a blanket in the truck as well, thankfully, foil-lined so she doesn’t need to worry about getting it wet through; the people around here obviously know to be prepared for the mountains. Getting everything set up is tricky when she has Nate leaning on her; she has to drop the first-aid kit into the snow and then shrug the blanket off her shoulders and kick it out flat as best she can.
Nate mumbles something incoherent as she eases him down to lie on the blanket. It sounds a bit like ‘be gentle with me, Mistress’.
She warms her fingers until they feel slightly more as if they belong to her, and then she crouches and carefully lifts up Nate’s bloodstained shirt. It’s heavy, crusted to his skin, and so much of his blood has seeped into her own clothes by now that an observer would probably have trouble guessing which of them has been shot. She draws in a sharp breath at the sight of the wound.
“Nate?” she asks. “Something tells me you’ll know more about this than I do.”
Nate frowns. “What, you don’t know how to treat a bullet wound?”
Elena raises her eyebrows. “I’m a journalist. I’m not some kind of secret agent.”
“I mean, I’d have thought you’d have looked it up after last time.”
It’s amazing he doesn’t end up with a bullet in his abdomen more often, really. “I thought my days of getting shot at were over,” she says. “Didn’t count on running into you again. Do people try to kill you in every country you visit?”
“Just most of ’em.” He winces, coughs. “Uh, okay, don’t try to take the bullet out. It’s not that I don’t trust you-”
“Yeah, I’m incredibly offended,” Elena says, looking through the first-aid kid. “So, what, I should just try to stop the bleeding?”
Nate doesn’t answer her; he’s still conscious when she glances back at him, but he doesn’t really seem aware that she just asked him a question. Still, they seemed to be having a lucid conversation for a moment. That’s encouraging.
There are pads and bandages and ice packs in the kit, although she doubts the last will really be necessary, and, well, it seems unlikely that trying to stop the bleeding will make things worse.
-
“Nate?” she asks, quietly, his blood drying on her fingers. She has to say it again before he blinks and turns his head to focus on her. “How do you feel?”
It takes Nate a while to answer, like he’s on the other end of a slow video connection. “Kind of like I’ve just been shot,” he says, eventually.
Not exactly what she was hoping for. “Do you also feel like someone’s cleaned it and bandaged it and maybe not completely screwed it up?”
Nate blinks again, raises his head to look down his body, awkwardly brushes the pad bandaged against his wound with his fingertips. “Thanks,” he says, after another long pause. He might be trying to smile; it’s difficult to tell. “I guess I do feel a little like that.”
-
Nate sleeps on a bed of torn-up train upholstery in the back of the truck, the blanket draped over the open top like a tarpaulin. Elena sits in the driver’s seat; the passenger side has mostly caved in. She doesn’t sleep.
-
They sit in front of a dying fire with their shoulders pressed together, the blanket draped over their heads and backs. Elena wishes the truck had a working heater. She wishes she hadn’t lost control. She doesn’t quite wish that she hadn’t followed the train in the first place, because the idea of Nate lying here and slowly bleeding to death on his own makes her feel ill, but she’s very close to it.
They should never have gone through with this train plan. Jeff was killed. They should have recognised what they were up against; they should have gone home. But no, Nathan Drake had to be stupid and noble and stupid-
And she had to be equally stupid and go after him, and even now she can’t say for certain she wouldn’t do it again. She can’t blame him for this.
“I don’t want you to think I’m ungrateful,” Nate says, coughing, “but if this was meant to be a rescue mission it could’ve gone better.”
Elena’s been thinking the same thing herself. She considers making a snide remark in response.
“I’m sorry,” she says instead, after a moment. “If we both die.”
Nate frowns. “We’re not both gonna die. Why would we both die? You’re not hurt. You could walk back out of here. Might take you a while, but you could do it.”
Elena starts to speak, but Nate cuts her off.
“You should do it,” he says, his voice becoming clearer with realisation. “You should leave right now if you want to make it. Why are you even still here?”
“I’m not leaving without you.”
“Elena, don’t do this ridiculous self-sacrificing thing, please.”
Elena stares. “Oh, yes, I’m being ridiculous and self-sacrificing.”
Nate looks puzzled for a moment, then laughs. “Yeah, okay, you’ve got a point.”
Maybe she should leave. Moving is already beginning to feel strange, her muscles half-paralysed with cold. She’d like to be able to give him more time to heal, but this isn’t exactly the best place for recovery. They need to get out of here while she’s still healthy enough to support him.
Elena stands, pulling the blanket around her shoulders (“Hey!” Nate protests), squinting in the direction they came from. The sky is dark and the snow is falling thick and she’s never been so hungry in her life. “We’re gonna have to walk back along the tracks.”
“Both of us?” he asks. “I’ll slow you down. Long way back to civilisation.”
“Yeah, but it’ll be even longer if we just sit here.” She ducks to pull his arm over her shoulders and straightens up, half-dragging him to his feet. “C’mon, we can make it.”
Nate winces, giving a hiss of pain. Elena puts her arms around him, clasping both hands tightly over his bandaged wound, and they take their first stumbling steps back the way they came.
-
She doesn’t know how long they’ve been walking. It feels like hours, but the featureless landscape and the close-falling snow all around them makes it look like they haven’t moved at all. Her cheeks are freezing, and the cold air is scraping out her lungs, and Nate seems to be becoming heavier, somehow.
“We’re doing great,” she says, quietly. “Just keep going.”
They only make it a few steps farther.
Nate stumbles and falls, knocking them both down into the snow. He rolls onto his back with a groan of pain. Elena pushes herself to her hands and knees to see that at some point his wound has started bleeding again; his shirt got hiked up as he fell, and the pad and bandage underneath are soaked through. There’s fresh blood in the snow when she lifts her hands away.
She should have given it more time before they started walking. Of course it hadn’t healed enough to hold. Stupid. She’d been so worried that they’d become too weak to make it if they waited.
Elena shifts herself to sit next to him, hugging her knees to her chest. “Nate?”
He sounds like he’s on the other side of thick glass. “Elena, I’m sorry, I’m sorry, I can’t go on. I’ll just bleed out and die and then you’ll be stuck with my big stupid corpse.”
“You’ll die if you stay here,” she says.
“You need to keep going.”
“Not without you.”
“Damn it, Elena-”
“I’m not just going to lie down and die next to you,” she says. She has to be practical, after all. She still has a life and a job and people who care about her, even if Nate is right, even if this is his last adventure. “I’ll go. But not while I know you’re alive.”
He laughs a little, but it’s kind of cut off and strangled by his breathing, too fast and too shallow. “What, so you’re just gonna sit here and watch me die like some kind of vulture?”
It’s an effort to smile. “I’m sure there’s a better way to put that.”
“Some kind of beautiful vulture,” he says. “Some kind of gorgeous, amazing vulture.” He struggles up to a sitting position and just looks at her for a while before speaking again. “It was really good to see you again, you know.”
This all feels uncomfortably sincere. Then again, if you can’t be sincere in the Himalayas when one of you is bleeding to death, when can you be sincere?
“You’d better miss me,” he says, with a trace of a grin.
Elena kisses him.
He moves to touch her face after a moment; his hand is damp and covered in snow. His lips are cold but his mouth is warm, the only warm thing about him, and Elena feels something in her relax; she hadn’t realised it until now, but this is the first moment since she found him that she’s really been able to make herself believe he’s still alive.
“Hang on, okay?” she whispers, stroking his hair. “Maybe a train will come.”
Nate presses his head against her collarbone and closes his eyes.
-
A train doesn’t come.
She should leave. She should go and get out of here and make sure that one of them, at least, survives this. But she can’t make herself, not when she has Nate lying with his head in her lap, sleeping or unconscious.
There’s a faint rustle and crunch, muffled by the falling snow, and at first she thinks she’s imagining it. She goes still, listening very hard.
There’s another faint crunch, and another. Like footsteps. Like someone’s walking through the snow nearby.
She’s dreaming.
“Hello?” she calls, but her voice is quieter than she was trying for and cracks halfway through the word and she has to try again. “Hello?”
The footsteps stop, and she thinks she might hear someone call something in response, but it’s too muffled to make out, or perhaps it’s in a language she doesn’t understand. She focuses on the direction the voice came from, trying to see through the blur of snow.
It might just be a shadow, but...
Elena eases Nate’s head off her lap, carefully, and crawls a little closer to the figure. If it’s a shadow, it isn’t hers. It looks like it’s standing. It doesn’t move when she does.
It could still be a hallucination. Worse, it could be one of Lazarević’s men, although she can’t imagine they’ll really care about killing Nate if they’ve been stranded in the train crash as well.
But it could be someone who can help.
Elena struggles to her feet and runs as fast as she can manage through the thickening snow.