A/N: Hey everyone! I've lived and learned and finally felt like I could write something worth reading and hopefully true to the spirit of Uncharted. I wanted to experiment with a new style of writing –one that was mostly emotional and personalized to the characters, as if you're treading through their exact thoughts/memories. For this reason, it may be sensational and disorderly, with time skips, but fun to read. I also wanted to design/fill out a backstory between Nate, Chloe and Sully that is mostly consistent with the series' plots. Enjoy and please review!

Summary: ["Did you trust her?", Elena asks. "Yes." A pause, then a correction (with a sheepish smile), "Most times."] Years after the dust has settled, Elena films and interviews Nate, Chloe and Sully to hear all of the stories she wasn't a part of, and to close the chapter on their adventures. [ChloexNatexElena, Sully, Navarro]


The Best of the Worst

Chapter One

"What was it like being partners with Nate?"

Chloe sighs and repeats the question in the empty air, avoiding the black void of the camera lens. It's taken her years of distraction to make herself forget the feelings that are rising up like bile on her tongue. She wants to say that being partners with him was not much different from her experience being in a relationship with him, but somehow, it seems like answering that way would be in poor taste. How many gun barrels has she stared down, or else pointed at some vague enemy with him, without him or because of him? Ups and downs, near-misses…years of paths crossing and uncrossing to lead them all to this point. These questions should be easier to answer.

"It was interesting", she says with a tight smile.


It's like waiting for a train. You shuffle your feet at the platform, try to remember the schedule, stare into empty space, wonder about everything and nothing because suddenly you have the time for it. But you don't really want to have the time for it, you want to get wherever you're going. And at the moment you start to feel irrational, impatient or whatever little feeling that's amplified by the circumstances. It's enough to get you noticed, and a stranger eases your anxiety without even looking into your eyes, saying "It'll come". It's intuitive almost, like the situation causes you to think and feel the same things, and there's only this little coincidence of timing and intention keeping you together, waiting for this same train. But it's enough. More than enough. It does so much by doing so little. That's what it's like being with Nate.

He gets you to do things you never thought you'd do, and nine times out of ten it's out of necessity. But in that window of opportunity, that time when the smaller fraction is ruling our outcome, he's trying to push you to be better because this business shouldn't take everything out of you. And we decided together, with that first smile, first kiss, our second and third heartbreaks, that we were going to be imperfect and human. Stealing, plotting, backstabbing all became second nature. Laughing, crying, loving…well, that was a bit harder. We found ways to reverse that didn't we? Little pockets of paradise on crumbling rooftops, seedy bars, backseats. In the end we couldn't find a place to fit them all. Not together anyways.

At least we have all those 'remember when's to bring us back to our young-ish days before the mess, and before the happy conclusion Nate got. See, kid? Your luck never runs dry.

I remember when I could say those words to his face, with one half of intimate meaning. That time in Seville, the poor dear about to be caught; pulling him by his lapels into a darkened corner, my red-lipstick-smile, a kiss on his jaw and the thrumming, slick pressure of his reciprocations along my neck.

But darling, I earn my luck in bits and pieces.

He'd be a fool not to recognize it, and so he does. Every precise headshot, every sweetly-murmured negotiation in all the right ears. He knew the type of girl I was. Didn't stop him from wanting more than I could give.

But goddammit Nate, it costs too much to be the hero all the time. And we were starting to fight each other in small ways, because in hindsight, maybe our love was a bad seed. Sure it grew, but as time passed, it became less of what we expected until it was so foreign to us both that it wasn't worth nurturing. And sure, you let go first…but I made you do it.


"Maybe I'm getting ahead of myself."

Elena makes some indistinct adjustments to the equipment, and Chloe is suddenly very conscious of the possibility that her expression is revealing more than what's appropriate. Elena had said that this whole project was an attempt at catharsis for the four of them. It's uncomfortable getting to that point, and Chloe's not sure if she can give herself the patience needed for it.

"Take as much time as you need", she says.

It's been five years since the wedding. They've all had time to settle into whatever brand of future they were going to have apart from one another. And even though Chloe's mind can't help but wander, her hands can't help but search for skin (whether her own or another man's, but almost always in place of his), she knows it in her darkened little heart that Elena deserves to hear an abridged truth. That ring on Elena's finger is there through cumulative efforts, and not just Nathan's realization and Chloe's retreat. There's a whole history that was sacrificed, yielded up from Chloe and out of her own hands, so that Elena could live a life with him instead of her. It's not worth disturbing, even for her own catharsis. Besides, it's getting a bit late for all of this.

It's afternoon now, and Elena instructs her to sit closer to the left so that a shaft of sunlight catches on her hair and the side of her face. The darling, she cares about how all of this looks ontop of everything else. It's even possible that she's reached that height of Maslow's hierarchy that makes it bearable for her to look at Chloe and not mind confronting the beauty that is so different from her own; that dangerous opportunity, from behind the lens, to view Chloe as her husband might have, even if only for a brief flicker.

Elena is the bigger person out of the two of them, because she doesn't falter for a minute. She's so calm, and barely there at all, "Maybe start from the beginning."


The beginning? Stories like ours don't start that way. Things happen, and you're lead together and apart by the same merciless hand. And you're always bruised from the journey away from that same spot that the return is more than often just added insult. It's better to run from the memories rather than dwell in them. Maybe some of this is sounding like superstition, but it comes from self-taught preservation techniques before Sully got to me: things like, never visit the same place twice when you're being followed; let yourself feel fear sometimes, because you never know what inventive solution can come from human error.

"Things don't always happen the right way for you. I can tell", Sully had said. And he was right. He didn't even know me yet, and he was right.

I was sixteen and making all of my mistakes early, missing all my shots, taking on a job I couldn't handle: discern the whereabouts of a certain Victor Sullivan, steal a map and report back. The man I worked for was someone I wanted to please, because at the time, the money mattered less than the credibility. So I agreed, and pushed back that lump of unease, that feeling that you're only a pawn for a larger purpose.

What do I remember? Driving without a license, scaling rooftops, finding him in dim torchlight amongst the mosquitoes. Wanting to satisfy that touch of bloodlust and little-girl's pride, so I took him by surprise and the struggle isn't much of one because the knife I carried is flung across the ground alongside his cigar. And he trips me too hard, the stiff, booted leather against my ankle, and the terrible self-conscious seconds between falling on my hip in the sand and that personal shock that comes from being winded: the realization that you don't know what your next move will be, and dammit you're running out of time. I could hear his slightly amazed words from above, "You're just a kid."

And in the time it takes him to say that, he wants to take it back because I'm closer to being a woman than a child. I let him notice, I let myself play submissive because while he's suffering through his tangled desire, I can win this. But when you're a woman playing a man's game, getting caught is different, the consequences are harder to bear. And it's a stroke of paternalism and snide cruelty when Sully bends down to meet me ("Relax"), avoiding the sand I'm kicking up, all the rearing of mine like I'm a wild horse, and the half-gains I make against him before I fall on my back. And he surprises me, because I'm not expecting a single moment of kindness (but these things happen when you least expect them).

He takes my hurt ankle in his warm palms and stretches my leg out towards him, letting the bottom of my foot rest on his chest like a halted kick. I can feel the steady thump thump of his heart through my sole, and it magnifies and separates into my own pain as his thumb presses and kneads.

"It's twisted", he says.

"It didn't get that way by itself", and for the way he's looking at me, half-amused and agitated, Sully wasn't expecting me to spit back any amount of indignance. I'm not in a position to. But I'm a fighter even when I'm down, and he can recognize it in me because he's like that too.

A scoff, a sharp look, the beginnings of desire starting to uncoil and recline itself.

"You should've known better", he says. Then, "Get up."

He doesn't help me at first, because lessons like these should be learned the hard way; examples have to be set. I whimper before I shift my weight onto my other leg, and his eyes travel up from the cigar he picked up off the sand to my face in a very slow journey.

"Hurts more than you thought it would?"

It did, and for so many reasons: fighting a fight I wasn't ready for and losing; finding sympathy in an enemy; being sixteen and a girl and not good enough except for the cheap victories that come from inviting lust. And worst of all, realizing how expendable I was when Sully, gritting his teeth and squinting his eyes, criticizes, "They didn't even give you a gun?"

Then, saving me embarrassment, "You're damn lucky I'm a gentleman", he says.

I don't know why the hell he did the things he did when he met me, but Sully scooped me up in his arms and carried me to his porch, iced the ankle he twisted, then sent me home in a cab. Before he shut the car door, he leaned in close against the window and smiled all Cheshire-like, "Don't look for me again."


"Did you?" Elena asks.

The camera lens takes in all the specifics of Chloe's mental maneuvering: the dampened, pursed lips; the eyes made unnaturally vivid with all the light –grey like a lynx's, rising up then away because staring down a piece of equipment doesn't intimidate it away.

They can both tell that she doesn't want to continue telling this story, but she does.

"I didn't have to. It took me two and a half years, but I got better at this game. I was out in the field, finding new partners, getting the bigger cut of the deal. It was all routine. Then, thousands of miles from where we first started, he found me. This time, with Nate."

There is a pause. Elena knows she can stop right here before she touches upon a piece of the past that she won't be able to bury. But the story is worth it. It's their story, and it needs to be told. So she swallows the sour taste in her mouth and spares Chloe an encouraging glance.

"Tell me about it."