Universe: Uncharted
Characters/Themes: Nate and Sully (bby!Nate and papa!Sully); hurt/comfort, family, friendship
Note: Series of three drabbles of close calls from Nate and Sully's past. Third one is taken from 'Nice Things' fic. These can be originally found in parts on my tumblr: tagged/my-writing
Nate's 18 and Sully's becoming more of a mentoring father than simply a friend and business partner. And, although he won't admit it, Nate's okay with that. He's also okay with it not being discussed for another 18 years.
Consequently, he still isn't totally sure how Sully feels towards him. Though again, he'd prefer not to know.
Anyway, Nate tell himself firmly, focus. Which, as they are currently scaling a tower wall, is pretty good self-advice.
Sully glances across from Nate's left, raising an eyebrow at his paused position. "Alright, kid?"
Nate looks at him and grins. "Yeah, sure. Weren't you going to leave the climbing to me, anyway?" He replies with a usual cocky undertone. Sully just rolls his eyes and continues climbing.
"Shut up, Nate," he grumbles, "showin' off ain't gonna get you anywhere."
The teen just grins and follows his mentor's lead in finding stone handholds. The two of them scale the rest of the horizontal wall in quick time, and crouch behind a conveniently placed crumbled watchtower.
Nate scans the field ahead of them, noting the guards stationed strategically around the ruins they are aiming for. The client had warned them it might be guarded. He crouches back down and looks at Sully.
"There's ten, maybe eleven," he reports quietly, and the older man nods.
"Where abouts?" Sully asks lowly in reply. Nate gestures to the right and left aimlessly and shrugs. "Some near cover, but some are just standing in the open."
Sully smirks. "Easy." He slips a grenade off his belt and nods in the direction of the tower they're going to.
"Okay, kid. I'll take 'em out, go over there and distract them with this," He holds up the grenade and Nate gives a doubtful nod. "You pick off the rest from here," Sully concludes.
The teen shrugs non-commitally. "It's a good of a plan as any. Let's go."
Sully nods back and sneaks past their cover, slipping undetected behind the closest tree as Nate watches warily. The plan probably (mostly) would have worked had a guard not unknowingly flanked the treasure hunters and spotted Nate.
As a result, he is suddenly grabbed from behind by a lone soldier, and struggles as silently as possible, trying to keep tabs on Sully's progress in taking out the guards stealthily.
Nate continues to struggle in the guard's hold, keeping him silent and biding time until Sully reaches the ruins. Eventually he does - undetected, helpfully - and takes cover behind a wall before pulling out the pin of the grenade and throwing it in the opposite direction.
There's a loud explosion and some yelling, then all hell breaks loose.
Apparently most of the guards have been hiding, and now they pour out from all sides, firing at random and shouting. Typical, Nate thinks wearily to himself as he finally manages to headbutt the guy holding him and twists around, stepping back and lands a heavy punch at the guy's face for good measure.
He barely stops to watch the thug go down; he throws himself back behind cover and alternates between blind fire and aiming over the wall for the next ten minutes or so, with frequent glance towards the ruins to determine that Sully's doing the same.
Eventually the ranks thin enough for Sully to start making his way back over to Nate - he'd suggested, using hand signals, doing it the other way around, but Sully had shook his head. Clearly there was something that needed saying.
As Nate takes out the last few guards with well-aimed headshots, Sully dodges from cover to cover, occasionally firing, across the field.
He's still a couple of trees away when he sees the guy behind Nate rising, and the kid isn't aware as he aims over his cover.
"Nate! Behind you!" Sully shouts, but too late; as Nate spins around and starts pointing his gun at the guy, the goon snatches it out of his hand and smacks him over the head with it.
Everything goes a little blurry as he tries to shake off the stunning, and he barely reacts when the guy grabs him by the shirt and bodily throws him towards the edge of the cliff.
Nate distantly hears Sully shout again, and he struggles to get up and away from the ledge as the guy advances on him again, cracking knuckles.
Frantically, Nate searches for a way out or a weapon, but comes up empty. Just as the guy reaches for him again, a shot rings out and the thug stops, shocked, and falls forward. Nate's about to breathe a sigh of relief when the guy's hand shoots out and hit him.
It's barely enough to bruise, but it's enough right now to push him off balance. Even as Sully shouts his name again in renewed panic, Nate almost feels time slowing as he tries and fails to grip something, and the ground rushes up to meet him from far too far away, and far too quickly.
Sully watches in horror as Nate falls, and runs straight to the edge, looking down. The kid's landed sprawled on his side, and not moving.
"Shit, shit, shit…" Sully mutters to himself as he recklessly descends the wall towards the kid. He's only 18, this shouldn't have happened, he should've been safer…
Sully reaches the bottom a couple of feet away from Nate, and hurries over, kneeling next to him, fear settling in and chilling him to the bones. He doesn't dare move Nate yet; instead, he carefully checks for breaks in limbs, and takes the kid's wrist.
Thankfully it takes barely a second to find a steady pulse, and Sully closes his eyes for a second in relief. Knocked unconscious then; not surprising. He puts a hand on Nate's shoulder and mutters to himself. "Jesus, kid… gave me a hell of a scare."
After a minute, Nate shifts under his hand, slowly coming around, and blinks groggily. "S- Sully?"
Sully gives him a small smile and helps the kid sit up, shushing hisses of pain, and checks for any obvious blood or injuries with a visual once-over. "You hurt bad anywhere?" He asks in concern.
Nate starts to blink the fuzziness away, and thinks about the answer. He winces as various pains make themselves known, and rubs a sore spot at the back of his head, assumingly where he was knocked out.
"Twisted my ankle I think… hit my head, I guess," he mutters in reply, looking up at Sully's worried - close to scared - expression, and tries for a grin. "I'll be okay in a bit."
Sully just nods, debating on whether to move yet. The matter is taken out of his hands as Nate tries to get up already, and he quickly moves to push the kid back down. "Hey, easy… easy, kid. You took a hell of a fall there."
Nate blinks at him again, then nods and winces as he shifts a little. Sully sighs and moves around to sit beside the kid, leaning against the wall.
"Ruins were empty anyway. Job's a no-go," he informs Nate and receives a typical eyeroll and huff of annoyence in return, which makes him smile. Kid will be fine.
They sit there in the calm quiet of the jungle until Sully's quite sure he can fade out the memory of Nate dropping out of sight and seeing him crumpled unmoving on the ground. Of course, he won't forget, but for now, they are okay.
He glances to the side, reassuring himself of Nate's solidness beside him, then moves to get to his feet before holding out a hand to help the kid up.
Nate winces a bit again as he tests his injured ankle, and Sully keeps hold of him. "C'mon, kid. Let's go home," he says quietly. Nate looks up and nods with a small smile.
"Okay," he agrees, then hesitates. "And - thanks."
Sully smiles back, not needing anything more, and gives Nate's shoulder a gentle shake. "No problem, kid. Just - try not to fall down anything else for a while."
Nate grins and nods. "Deal."
Usual 16 year olds might cry at a hard fall. Even a 16 year old Nathan Drake can't cope as well with real pain as he'd like.
He hears Sully calling his name as he falls, but he doesn't have time to reply or even shout out in fear as the rocks rush up to meet him.
Pain explodes in his leg and his head pounds, the blow echoing in intensity. Nate chokes back a scream as he dares a look at his ankle; it's stained bright red and there's white sticking out in the midst of the bloodied wound.
Fighting against blackness invading his mind, he forces himself to take shaky breaths and squeezes his stinging eyes shut as he listens to hurried footsteps come closer.
"Oh, shit…" Nate swallow hard, feeling worse than sick, and blinhks at Sully's form kneeling next to him, looking terrified as he gives nate a once-over before focusing on the runied leg.
"Sully…" He tries not to let a sob break into the murmur, but everything hurts so damn much that more tears form in his eyes despite his best efforts. "It hurts," he sobs; it slips out before he can gather himself and man up.
He scrubs at his eyes fiercely, breath hitching in pain. Sully shushes him and looks around, trying to compose his own fear.
"Okay, kid, okay… we're gonna get you fixed up, come on…"
Nate grits his teeth and nods, another sob escaping him, and Sully helps him up as gently as possible. But standing feels like fire and Nate misses a minute - when he comes back to himself, Sully's frantically calling him as he all but holds the younger teen up.
"I'm… god it hurts," Nate chokes out, not even able to pretend he's fine, panting and sobbing as he clings to Sully for support and tries to pull himself together. Everything is foggy and so wrong.
"Okay, Nate. It's okay… you're gonna be okay," Sully says shakily, and Nate feels himself being picked up and he tries to smother a shout of pain as his whole goddamn body protests at the swift movement.
"You're gonna be fine, kid. Just hang on," Sully repeats for both their benefits, and Nate forces a grimace that's as close as he can to a smile, because, dammit, Sully's the hell in need of reassurance as much as he is, and there's no one else around.
"It will be okay," he aggrees in a whisper, even as shock settles in, blacking out his vision and chilling his bones. "I don't cry over scraped knees."
Nate is 17 and has been working with Sully for two years. Even though the kid has been with the older man since he had literally saved him in Cartagen and taken him on, he continued to be unsure of the precise nature, mainly in relationship terms, of their partnering.
Nevertheless, the two continue to take on jobs together, soon automatically covering one another in fights. But it isn't until Nate's life is truly threatened that he realises how much he means to his mentor.
It's not exactly an easy job to shoot people across a bridge. The concrete is an unspoken no-man's-land and, well, the thing itself doesn't look too stable to Nate anyway. Especially not now, after a few rounds of fire.
The teen glances to the other pillar that starts the bridge on their side, and watches as Sully draws back into cover and relodes his gun, grimacing. Nate can share his exasperation; they've been at this for nearly half an hour already. In Sully's words, 'goddamn back-stabbing client' had set them up and had a friggin army hunt them down. And, obviously, the way back is on the other side of the bridge where the sons of bitches are.
Sully catches Nate's eye and gestures over the pillar. "Less staring, more shooting, kid!" He yells before leaning over his cover and commencing the gunfight.
Nate nods, although Sully's already looked away, and quickly copies the over-cover attack, watching just long enough to see a heavily armoured guy with a goddamn SAS shotgun shrug off the fire and barely stop.
Right, tactic two.
The teen reaches over to where they dropped their stuff when attacked, and grabs a convenient grenade. He pulls out the key with his teeth and throws it mostly blindly over the pillar - the guy's too close to check.
He hears a satisfying blast and a quick glance round the side confirms the immediate threat is down. Smirking to himself, Nate resumes blind-firing over the top of his cover.
He only stops when the handgun runs out of ammo. "Shit," Nate curses, and chucks the gun away from him in disgust. However, there's an unexpected moment of silence, and Nate decides to take a chance.
Swiftly, he dodges out of his cover and around, reaching for dropped enemies' guns. But he snatches a hand away from a second machine gun and scrambles up in panic when a burst of fire smashes a railing next to where his head was.
On instinct, Nate fires in the direction of the attack without looking, and tries to hurry back to cover - he's gone further than he meant to; almost to the middle of the bridge, and is in a very vulnerable position.
Suddenly his feet disappear from under him as he trips on a body, and the teen lands hard on his stomach, face down, ears ringing and chin aching from the impact with the ground. He knows it's too late to move when he hears footsteps behind him and wildly wonders if this is a heroic way to go as stars and blackness dance in front of his eyes.
But there's no blazing pain when the gunshot rings out; instead, there's a panicked shout of "NATE!" and running footsteps, and Nate feels like maybe he's cared for a bit and maybe they won, and decides to try and move through pain. Only to freeze at Sully's next yell of "Behind you!"
He reacts too late, kicking out blindly into thin air, before he is dragged from the concrete by the scruff like a dog, and shaken hard, and punched harder, and then the weaponless brute finishes the torture by bodily throwing him at the railings of the bridge.
Pain explodes in his chest as the metal friggin dents at his impact, and Nate can barely do more than struggle to breathe and stare dazedly at the clouded sky. Until, that is, the guy looms over him again, grabs him by the shirt, and lifts him from the ground while the kid snatches at his throat in an attempt to push away the restriction.
"Hold on, kid!" Sully shouts from somewhere behind the giant, but the gunshots only make the guy growl in anger and he half-throws half-drops the boy away from him - too far. Nate barely has time to shout in terror before he smacks into the deep river below with harsh force and there's water everywhere.
"NATE!" Sully yells again, fear gripping his very heart as he sees the kid drop and disappear under the surface. He ignores the still-standing enemy and immediately runs to the bridge edge and vaults over the broken railing, landing in the cold water.
He surfaces quickly, gasping from the chill, and scans the area - water and bank - but finding no kid waving off the older man's concern.
Within seconds, Sully dives back underwater and looks around frantically, locating Nate a few feet away by both length and depth. The kid's barely struggling against drowning and Sully kicks out towards him as fast as possible, grabbing his arm the second he's within reach.
Nate immediately looks up, fear clearly written all over his face, and his eyes widen at the sight of Sully, mouth opening as if to call him before realising that they're still underwater, and he weakly struggles in renewed terror of the situation.
But Sully's grip is steady and firm, and he pulls the kid upwards with him. They break the surface together; Nate takes a breath that's still half water, choking, as Sully pulls them to the waterside. He hauls a coughing Nate up with him, and holds the kid close for a minute until he can breathe again.
He's shaking and panting, rubbing his chest with one hand while the other is unconsciously gripping Sully's sleeve in a vice-like hold. For his part, Sully just sits there, dripping wet and freezing, and lets the kid lean on him as they both catch their breath. He gently rubs Nate's shoulder while the kid's erratic gasping slow down, even as he remembers the enemy and scans the half broken bridge; but thankfully finding nothing.
Must've left them for dead, Sully thinks, relieved that they can finally get out of here. He is filled with a protective purpose: he wants to check Nate over, make sure the kid's just bruised and a little shocked, and look after him the way he has never with any other 'partner'.
Just as Sully's about to bring the kid back to awareness with a nudge, there's a crash and Nate's head snaps up. He and Sully watch in a weary silence as the ruined bridge finally gives up on its purpose of existence and collapses into the river, tumbling the bodies with it into a massive water-burial grave.
Nate just stares, then glances at Sully, the clear grateful look on his face now mixed with an unsure apology. Sully just shakes his head and sighs.
"This is why we can't have nice things, kid," he simply replies, and a half-smile flashes on Nate's face, frankly completing Sully's day. He pulls the kid up with him and they both get to their feet to begin the trek back to the car.