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greenstickered2012-04-26 06:08 pm
camalyng) wrote in greenstickered2012-04-26 06:08 pm
Uncharted: Fixed
Title: Fixed
What: Uncharted fanfiction - short story
Rating: PG13 (violent and sexual references, a little bad language)
Words: 2200
Summary: After Harry blows up in front of her, Chloe tries to fix things, but she can't fix how she feels.
Alternate link: Archive of Our Own; Tumblr rebloggable link to this
Sample: 'Friend' seems like the easiest word to explain this mostly professional relationship you had with him.
His arm is gone.
There's this splatter of blood against the pillar and the smoke is still clearing and your ears are still ringing and you've been hit by shrapnel but you don't even feel it, and his body's missing his arm and he shouldn't be a body, he should still be that asshole calling everyone endearments when he's about to kill you all.
"Oh my god," you blurt out.
"Elena!"
Nate's voice is what snaps you out of it, reminds you that there is, against all odds, someone here who's broken and bleeding but whole, and you force yourself to move to her, to try and fix what can still be salvaged, because you can't take him with you and help her; it wouldn't help him either.
You don't realize until much later how much it helps you, fixing things when you can't fix yourself, can't fix Harry. You focus on looking after Elena, on trying to talk Nate out of his suicide mission, on making sure she's stable when she insists on waiting for him. When you get back to the village, you take charge of finding what passes for a doctor, of forcing Nate to eat, of contacting Victor and letting him know his protege's just saved the world.
Victor takes over Nate duty when he reaches the village, and you're not sure you appreciate the break it gives you, because it gives you time to escape. You don't feel right leaving entirely when Elena's still unconscious and Nate's still freaking out, but you do go for a walk.
You're not really thinking about your route when your feet take you to the closest point to Shambhala.
"Harry..."
You run back to the village before you can be overwhelmed.
Nate and Elena's relationship is the last thing that needs fixing once Elena drags herself out of bed. Not five minutes after you tell Nate to go get her and you walk away, you hear him calling, "You're a dirty old man, Sullivan," so it doesn't entirely surprise you when Victor catches up with you. The two of you flirt over a few cups of that delicious Tibetan butter tea, but you don't let things go any further than that; it's a bit weird with someone old enough to be your dad and so close to Nate, especially after you've just let him go.
There's nothing left for you to do here. You hitch a ride to Lhasa and get on the first flight to Beijing, then find an English speaker and, not knowing what to do with yourself, fly to Sydney. Over the twenty-five hours you spend on airplanes and in airports, you never manage to sleep and you completely lose track of the time, the time zone, and the date; the only things that make sense are how much you hate Air China and should probably learn Mandarin.
It's a shock to hear English and with your own accent when you finally touch down in Sydney, to see blue eyes side eying your firearms at security, to have Qantas' customer service rep immediately understand you when you ask for the first flight to the Gold Coast. You're going home, you only realize when she asks where you've come from, to your parents' house, the one place in the world that feels stable when you have a revolving door of flats on three continents and couches and beds all over the world.
You book a shuttle from the airport.
Mum's a second generation English immigrant; this may be why you get on with Brits so well. Dad is very proud of having managed to train her out of offering to make tea at every opportunity barring a crisis, so as you were growing up, you came to associate Mum offering to make tea with bad things happening: Your first cat dying, Granddad going to hospital, her best friend's son going missing. Whenever you turn up on your parents' doorstep, after even forty-odd hours on planes, Mum usually just tells you to take a bath ("you need to relax, sweetheart") and asks what you want for dinner or lunch or whatever meal's closest.
So you know you must look terrible when she opens the door, looks at you, and takes on that calming tone to ask, "Do you want me to make you a cup of tea, love?"
You let her make the tea, warm your hands around it as she dances around the subject of what has you looking like hell and just updates you on the inanities of her life; you usually find it irritating (and that's why you're rarely home) but now you find it soothing. She lets you not talk about it for the next few days, though you do off-handedly mention to Dad that you helped a guy save the world.
"My baby girl, playing the hero?"
"Yeah, yeah, I know."
Nate e-mails you asking where you are (you sort of forgot to tell him A) you were leaving and B) where for) and if you're alright. You tell him you're home, but deflect from the second question by asking after Elena, and a few days later a bunch of flowers turns up on the doorstep addressed to you and signed from Elena and Nate.
Thank you for everything, the card reads, but you can tell your parents think they're condolence flowers for something you're not telling them. They feel like condolence flowers.
It's a week before you blurt out, "I lost a friend."
Friend seems like the easiest word to explain this mostly professional relationship you had with him, easier than telling Mum that you worked with him more times than you usually would, and you slept with him sometimes, and after Nepal you kind of came to hate him a bit, more after he pushed past you to shoot Nate on the train, and you were both pissed off when Lazarevic wouldn't buy you two decent coats in Tibet and told you to just huddle. It's easier than explaining that you huddled anyway because hell if either of you were cuddling up to some mercenary (you have standards), that you had sex in the freezing cold and he backhanded you when you accidentally called him Nate. It's easier than trying to explain that despite the way things ended, you did, underneath it all, honestly, genuinely like Harry Flynn, and when you try not to get attached to anyone, that's a big deal.
Mum makes you more tea and goes through the usual questions about how close you were, how he went ("violently, right in front of me"), if there's anything she can do for you; she makes awkward offers of a counselor or the local priest that you refuse.
Dad, a few days later, shows you a jacket he's had since you were little and tells you it was his own father's. It takes you an hour or so to figure out what he's trying to say with this, but once you do work it out, you book flights to England.
You break into Harry's flat with little effort. Besides a thin layer of dust forming over everything, it's exactly the way it was what feels like a lifetime ago, right after you'd reluctantly left Nate in jail in Turkey. The place still smells like him, his stupid icecream is still in the freezer, and when you sit down on his bed, it suddenly hits you that this was the last place you were truly happy with him, the last time you slept with him without hating him or pretending he was someone else, and this is the first time you really allow yourself to cry.
Harry isn't the first person who's died in front of you, nor the first person to die in front of you and not by your hand, and not even the first person to blow up in front of you. That's the reality of your line of work. But he is the first person you've cared about who's died in front of you.
After he shot Nate and Nate blew up the train, you didn't talk to Harry as the two of you recovered from the explosion, convinced that Nate was dead because he'd tried to play the hero and rescue you. You remember thinking that the physical pain you were in did not, could never match the black cloud your emotions turned into that you always thought was just a cliche, the cloud you're finally letting rain.
The first thing you said to Harry in a week since the explosion was when he was bitching about the cold and you'd finally snapped at him, "You're fucking British, surely you're used to this."
"No, love, I'm used to rain," he'd retorted, and you can't believe now that one of the last almost civil conversations you had with him was about the weather.
Eventually, when you think you don't actually have anything left to cry, you stand up and go to his closet, and take a shirt that looks like the one he was wearing when the two of you talked Nate into coming to Turkey, one of his black tees, and a jacket you recognize from one of your first jobs together.
You sleep in his bed for the night.
You're running out of money.
You hit up an Internet cafe and take the first job that matches your skill set, which turns out to be with one Charlie Cutter you've worked with before.
He pulls out a grenade. For a second all you can see is Harry, cut up and bruised and missing the pin on his grenade, and you actually blow both your covers to tackle him and you end up having to fight your way out.
"The hell was that about?" Charlie asks you, once you're out safely (and with the artifact you were hired to steal, at least).
"Nothing," you lie.
"Nothing almost cost us our lives and this job?"
"It won't happen again," you promise.
Except then you worry him again by almost throwing up on the train back to the hotel, and you don't get it when you think about it later because it looked nothing like the train Lazarevic had hired but the motion of it had thrown you right back to your fight with Nate, to Harry shooting him, to explosions and fire everywhere and god, you think you're losing it.
He makes you a cup of tea in your hotel room. You've probably drunk more tea in the last month than you have in the last year.
You try to stick to driving jobs after that, try to negotiate use of the car before and after the jobs so you don't have to rely on public transport. You find the swing of things again. Charlie keeps an eye on you when you find yourself in the same city, and he tries not to ask questions when you wear something of Harry's instead of your usual clingy clothes. They become part of your travel wardrobe, the staples that fly with you around the world instead of sitting in flats or storage units on three continents, and they lose his scent; sometimes you almost forget they were his.
Eventually, you get to the point where you can ride trains like a normal person and actually sleep on Air China flights. You don't know if that's healing, but at least it's one thing that's fixed.
The thing about Shambhala falling to pieces means there's no grave or anywhere to visit. You don't even know about his family and what they might have done for him; you never really talked about family with him. So a year after Shambhala, you end up back at the beach the two of you tracked Nate down to, wearing his shirt.
By some weird coincidence (you wonder if Nate had the same thought you did), Nate, Victor, and Elena are there too, and Nate's eyes widen almost comically when you greet him with, "Buy me a drink, sailor?"
Nate and Elena are wearing engagement rings, and when you raise an eyebrow at Nate, smiles spread across both their faces and it's all the explanation you need, proof that at least one thing you tried to fix after Harry's death is still in one piece.
"What about you," Elena asks, and you can tell she's not asking about relationships, just how you've been over the past year.
You try to make your smile reach your eyes.
"I'm alright," you repeat from the initial "hey! Chloe! how's it going?" greetings, and you don't give her more than that, but you do let Nate put his arm around you a few days later when the four of you end up on the same train back to the airport and you can't take your eyes off him in case something happens.
Elena takes you aside at the airport and hands you a business card.
"My boss recommends this counselor whenever we come back from a war zone," she explains, and you shake your head.
"Thank you," you say anyway, more sincere than when she'd first asked after you.
What: Uncharted fanfiction - short story
Rating: PG13 (violent and sexual references, a little bad language)
Words: 2200
Summary: After Harry blows up in front of her, Chloe tries to fix things, but she can't fix how she feels.
Alternate link: Archive of Our Own; Tumblr rebloggable link to this
Sample: 'Friend' seems like the easiest word to explain this mostly professional relationship you had with him.
His arm is gone.
There's this splatter of blood against the pillar and the smoke is still clearing and your ears are still ringing and you've been hit by shrapnel but you don't even feel it, and his body's missing his arm and he shouldn't be a body, he should still be that asshole calling everyone endearments when he's about to kill you all.
"Oh my god," you blurt out.
"Elena!"
Nate's voice is what snaps you out of it, reminds you that there is, against all odds, someone here who's broken and bleeding but whole, and you force yourself to move to her, to try and fix what can still be salvaged, because you can't take him with you and help her; it wouldn't help him either.
You don't realize until much later how much it helps you, fixing things when you can't fix yourself, can't fix Harry. You focus on looking after Elena, on trying to talk Nate out of his suicide mission, on making sure she's stable when she insists on waiting for him. When you get back to the village, you take charge of finding what passes for a doctor, of forcing Nate to eat, of contacting Victor and letting him know his protege's just saved the world.
Victor takes over Nate duty when he reaches the village, and you're not sure you appreciate the break it gives you, because it gives you time to escape. You don't feel right leaving entirely when Elena's still unconscious and Nate's still freaking out, but you do go for a walk.
You're not really thinking about your route when your feet take you to the closest point to Shambhala.
"Harry..."
You run back to the village before you can be overwhelmed.
Nate and Elena's relationship is the last thing that needs fixing once Elena drags herself out of bed. Not five minutes after you tell Nate to go get her and you walk away, you hear him calling, "You're a dirty old man, Sullivan," so it doesn't entirely surprise you when Victor catches up with you. The two of you flirt over a few cups of that delicious Tibetan butter tea, but you don't let things go any further than that; it's a bit weird with someone old enough to be your dad and so close to Nate, especially after you've just let him go.
There's nothing left for you to do here. You hitch a ride to Lhasa and get on the first flight to Beijing, then find an English speaker and, not knowing what to do with yourself, fly to Sydney. Over the twenty-five hours you spend on airplanes and in airports, you never manage to sleep and you completely lose track of the time, the time zone, and the date; the only things that make sense are how much you hate Air China and should probably learn Mandarin.
It's a shock to hear English and with your own accent when you finally touch down in Sydney, to see blue eyes side eying your firearms at security, to have Qantas' customer service rep immediately understand you when you ask for the first flight to the Gold Coast. You're going home, you only realize when she asks where you've come from, to your parents' house, the one place in the world that feels stable when you have a revolving door of flats on three continents and couches and beds all over the world.
You book a shuttle from the airport.
Mum's a second generation English immigrant; this may be why you get on with Brits so well. Dad is very proud of having managed to train her out of offering to make tea at every opportunity barring a crisis, so as you were growing up, you came to associate Mum offering to make tea with bad things happening: Your first cat dying, Granddad going to hospital, her best friend's son going missing. Whenever you turn up on your parents' doorstep, after even forty-odd hours on planes, Mum usually just tells you to take a bath ("you need to relax, sweetheart") and asks what you want for dinner or lunch or whatever meal's closest.
So you know you must look terrible when she opens the door, looks at you, and takes on that calming tone to ask, "Do you want me to make you a cup of tea, love?"
You let her make the tea, warm your hands around it as she dances around the subject of what has you looking like hell and just updates you on the inanities of her life; you usually find it irritating (and that's why you're rarely home) but now you find it soothing. She lets you not talk about it for the next few days, though you do off-handedly mention to Dad that you helped a guy save the world.
"My baby girl, playing the hero?"
"Yeah, yeah, I know."
Nate e-mails you asking where you are (you sort of forgot to tell him A) you were leaving and B) where for) and if you're alright. You tell him you're home, but deflect from the second question by asking after Elena, and a few days later a bunch of flowers turns up on the doorstep addressed to you and signed from Elena and Nate.
Thank you for everything, the card reads, but you can tell your parents think they're condolence flowers for something you're not telling them. They feel like condolence flowers.
It's a week before you blurt out, "I lost a friend."
Friend seems like the easiest word to explain this mostly professional relationship you had with him, easier than telling Mum that you worked with him more times than you usually would, and you slept with him sometimes, and after Nepal you kind of came to hate him a bit, more after he pushed past you to shoot Nate on the train, and you were both pissed off when Lazarevic wouldn't buy you two decent coats in Tibet and told you to just huddle. It's easier than explaining that you huddled anyway because hell if either of you were cuddling up to some mercenary (you have standards), that you had sex in the freezing cold and he backhanded you when you accidentally called him Nate. It's easier than trying to explain that despite the way things ended, you did, underneath it all, honestly, genuinely like Harry Flynn, and when you try not to get attached to anyone, that's a big deal.
Mum makes you more tea and goes through the usual questions about how close you were, how he went ("violently, right in front of me"), if there's anything she can do for you; she makes awkward offers of a counselor or the local priest that you refuse.
Dad, a few days later, shows you a jacket he's had since you were little and tells you it was his own father's. It takes you an hour or so to figure out what he's trying to say with this, but once you do work it out, you book flights to England.
You break into Harry's flat with little effort. Besides a thin layer of dust forming over everything, it's exactly the way it was what feels like a lifetime ago, right after you'd reluctantly left Nate in jail in Turkey. The place still smells like him, his stupid icecream is still in the freezer, and when you sit down on his bed, it suddenly hits you that this was the last place you were truly happy with him, the last time you slept with him without hating him or pretending he was someone else, and this is the first time you really allow yourself to cry.
Harry isn't the first person who's died in front of you, nor the first person to die in front of you and not by your hand, and not even the first person to blow up in front of you. That's the reality of your line of work. But he is the first person you've cared about who's died in front of you.
After he shot Nate and Nate blew up the train, you didn't talk to Harry as the two of you recovered from the explosion, convinced that Nate was dead because he'd tried to play the hero and rescue you. You remember thinking that the physical pain you were in did not, could never match the black cloud your emotions turned into that you always thought was just a cliche, the cloud you're finally letting rain.
The first thing you said to Harry in a week since the explosion was when he was bitching about the cold and you'd finally snapped at him, "You're fucking British, surely you're used to this."
"No, love, I'm used to rain," he'd retorted, and you can't believe now that one of the last almost civil conversations you had with him was about the weather.
Eventually, when you think you don't actually have anything left to cry, you stand up and go to his closet, and take a shirt that looks like the one he was wearing when the two of you talked Nate into coming to Turkey, one of his black tees, and a jacket you recognize from one of your first jobs together.
You sleep in his bed for the night.
You're running out of money.
You hit up an Internet cafe and take the first job that matches your skill set, which turns out to be with one Charlie Cutter you've worked with before.
He pulls out a grenade. For a second all you can see is Harry, cut up and bruised and missing the pin on his grenade, and you actually blow both your covers to tackle him and you end up having to fight your way out.
"The hell was that about?" Charlie asks you, once you're out safely (and with the artifact you were hired to steal, at least).
"Nothing," you lie.
"Nothing almost cost us our lives and this job?"
"It won't happen again," you promise.
Except then you worry him again by almost throwing up on the train back to the hotel, and you don't get it when you think about it later because it looked nothing like the train Lazarevic had hired but the motion of it had thrown you right back to your fight with Nate, to Harry shooting him, to explosions and fire everywhere and god, you think you're losing it.
He makes you a cup of tea in your hotel room. You've probably drunk more tea in the last month than you have in the last year.
You try to stick to driving jobs after that, try to negotiate use of the car before and after the jobs so you don't have to rely on public transport. You find the swing of things again. Charlie keeps an eye on you when you find yourself in the same city, and he tries not to ask questions when you wear something of Harry's instead of your usual clingy clothes. They become part of your travel wardrobe, the staples that fly with you around the world instead of sitting in flats or storage units on three continents, and they lose his scent; sometimes you almost forget they were his.
Eventually, you get to the point where you can ride trains like a normal person and actually sleep on Air China flights. You don't know if that's healing, but at least it's one thing that's fixed.
The thing about Shambhala falling to pieces means there's no grave or anywhere to visit. You don't even know about his family and what they might have done for him; you never really talked about family with him. So a year after Shambhala, you end up back at the beach the two of you tracked Nate down to, wearing his shirt.
By some weird coincidence (you wonder if Nate had the same thought you did), Nate, Victor, and Elena are there too, and Nate's eyes widen almost comically when you greet him with, "Buy me a drink, sailor?"
Nate and Elena are wearing engagement rings, and when you raise an eyebrow at Nate, smiles spread across both their faces and it's all the explanation you need, proof that at least one thing you tried to fix after Harry's death is still in one piece.
"What about you," Elena asks, and you can tell she's not asking about relationships, just how you've been over the past year.
You try to make your smile reach your eyes.
"I'm alright," you repeat from the initial "hey! Chloe! how's it going?" greetings, and you don't give her more than that, but you do let Nate put his arm around you a few days later when the four of you end up on the same train back to the airport and you can't take your eyes off him in case something happens.
Elena takes you aside at the airport and hands you a business card.
"My boss recommends this counselor whenever we come back from a war zone," she explains, and you shake your head.
"Thank you," you say anyway, more sincere than when she'd first asked after you.
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