Chapter Text
Today could be going better. It’s a gross understatement. Nate is hanging from the back of a train, and said train is hanging from a cliffside, minutes if not seconds from rolling into the ravine, sending Nate towards certain death. There’s also a bullet in his stomach and a little too much blood on his shirt for his liking. Also his fingers are numb from the cold and don’t particularly want to hang on to the railing for much longer.
“Be a lot easier just to let go,” Nathan mutters, sizing up the climb ahead of him. It’s going to be…
What’s the word that means “so miserable, painful, and soul-sucking that if you even make it halfway up the train, you’ll be so drained that you’ll have to turn into a plant and photosynthesize to have enough energy to make it the rest of the way?” Because that’s what this climb is going to be like.
Maybe Nate has wallowed in his pity for too long, or maybe whatever deity is trying to kill him realized that he hasn’t fallen yet. Either way, a massive boulder cracks off the cliffside and nearly knocks Nate clean off the train. He dodges at the last second, gasping as the motion pulls at the gunshot wound.
After a moment to collect himself, Nathan starts climbing up the slats on the underside of the train. When those run out, he grabs a metal rod running along the train’s wheels and starts scooching upwards.
And then the top of the rod makes an ominous crack and breaks off of the train, dropping Nate a good eight feet. His stomach drops an extra hundred. He screams - and he screams way longer than he actually needs to, but he’s at a point in his life where he just needs a good scream.
Heart jack-rabbiting, Nathan swings back to the side of the train and crawls through the window. He can hear the rod squeal and fall away from the car altogether. He tries very hard not to think about how a few seconds slower, and he might have fallen down with it.
The car is completely vertical, the seats facing directly upwards. Grabbing the back of a seat and pulling himself up, Nathan is given his first opportunity to get the weight off his arms and just stand. God, he misses standing.
Then the train lurches ominously, and Nate decides to be grateful once he’s not facing the immediate threat of death. He leaps out of the way as a seat above him breaks loose and threatens to take him out. Of course, when you’re standing on the back of a train seat in a car hanging from a mountain, there aren’t many places to leap to. He crashes through the window and barely catches himself on another metal rod.
Nate doesn’t stop to breathe this time, climbing up as quickly as he can. “Please hold, please hold, please hold,” he begs like an underpaid employee working for the Target customer service line. He’s nearly made it to the top when the part of the train still partially grounded on the edge of the cliff starts to whine and drift towards the ravine. The rod clanks and breaks loose again.
“No, no, no!” Nathan shrieks, narrowly avoiding being crushed by cargo that falls out of the hold. He jumps off the rod and climbs to the top of the train car. “Oh man, I’m so tired of climbing shit,” he mutters, ascending to the train car still on the ground.
The second he sets foot on the car, however, the whole thing shakes and starts sliding down the ravine.
“Oh, shit.”
Nate sprints for it, one arm bracing the burning, stabbing pain in his stomach, the other pumping like mad as he tries to make it to the front of the car before it drops him into the endless chasm below. The faster he runs, the faster the car seems to fall, and by the time he reaches the front, he has to leap for the cliffside.
The seconds draw out as he reaches for the ledge, praying that gravity will be kind to him, that he won’t miss and fall into the gaping maw of nothingness at the bottom of the ravine. And gravity is kind… kind of. Because Nathan grabs the stony ledge, but his whole body also slams into the cliffside.
His gunshot wound slams into the cliffside.
For a terrifying moment, Nathan’s vision turns white, bile fills his mouth, and he can’t feel his hands or his feet because he’s so distracted by the blinding pain. But then gravity tugs at him once more, and he forces himself to focus on the ground. On strengthening his grip. On army crawling his way forward until his legs are no longer hanging over the side of a cliff.
Then he loses all strength in his arms and legs, he collapses on his back, and the world fades to white.
---
The first thing Nathan notices is that his clothes are soaked, which is annoying, because he hasn’t wet the bed since he was five. Also, how does one pee the bed so inefficiently that they get their shirt wet too? And their hair? And-
Oh. No. That’s just snow. He’s lying in the snow. And the wetness on the front of his shirt is just…
Oh. It’s just blood. No biggie. It’s just a… just a huge swamp of blood. But it’s nothing that a little stubbornness and a clinical lack of self-regard can’t ignore, right?
Dragging himself to his feet, Nathan limps away from the edge of the cliff (Had he really thought it was a good idea to take a nap that close to a cliff?) and towards the twisted wreckage of the rest of the train. There’s a flaming tree next to his path, and he’s pretty sure with his luck, it’ll crash down and kill him as he goes past.
It does not do this. It does, however, get very close. Because that’s Drake luck for you. Live to suffer even worse later.
Nate moves along the ruined train cars, ducking sparking cables and giving any fires a wide berth. He’s hunched over, every step threatening to rip out his guts. One man, only slightly more unfortunate than Nate (though that’s really a matter of perspective), lies cold and unmoving in the snow. Nathan nudges him with his foot, determines that he is, in his professional opinion, super dead, and steals his revolver.
“Sorry. You don’t need this, right?” Nathan turns to slip into a cargo cabin, but then he hears a groaning, dying voice.
“Come back…”
Nate quite nearly jumps out of his skin, heart racing in his chest. He whips around, but the man is still just as dead, just as lifeless as before.
“Hell-o?” Nate calls tentatively. “Am I hallucinating, or was that the wind?”
“The wind,” the wind shrieks.
“Ah. Good. That clears it up.” (It clears up nothing.)
Trying to ignore the wind (or his hallucinations or whatever), Nathan enters the cargo cabin and treads towards the exit on the other end. The door is padlocked shut, of course, because everything is always locked.
Nate sighs. If any of Lazerević’s men are still around, he’s going to give away his position. He takes a breath to steady his hand and fires at the padlock, breaking the chain loose. He slides the door open, gun at the ready for anyone who might have heard him.
Sure enough, there’s a guard shooting at him the moment he turns the corner. Nate ducks back inside the cabin, waits for the lull in gunshots, and then shoots the gun from the guard’s hands. Then he cold-clocks the guy with his revolver and a quiet, “Sorry.”
Nate scales the debris, making his way to the roof of a passenger cabin. And that’s when Drake luck kicks in again.
The train engine, far enough away to seem distant but close enough away to be unfortunate, finally catches on fire, and the whole thing explodes, knocking Nate through a hole in the roof. He falls flat on his back on the cabin floor and is pulling himself to his feet when a second explosion goes off, causing the whole car to tilt and then roll. He goes flying, hitting the wall, then the floor, then the wall again (or is it the ceiling?), brain rattling in his skull and body getting beaten like a scrambled egg. When the car finally stops moving, Nate lands on his stomach. Everything hurts and…
Oh, look at that. Colors are starting to get smeary. The wind starts talking again. And then, he can’t see anything at all, mind wandering away from his dying body and disappearing into oblivion.
---
When Nate regains consciousness, he’s officially Way Too Bloody. It’s the gunshot wound, he knows. He needs help, he also knows. But he’s lying in a burning train car in the middle of the Himalayas. There’s not much help to be found.
Struggling to his feet, Nathan feels the car lurch and whine ominously. It sounds a little too familiar for his taste. He inches forward and sees that the back of the car - now completely missing - leads out into… another ravine. God! Why does this mountain have so many mountains??
Not looking for a repeat of the last train car he was in that fell off a cliff (it’s officially happened twice now in his entire life, all within the span of an hour, and wow, Nate wishes his life was just a tiny bit more boring), he leaps out the side door and clings to the railing of another car that’s only slightly less unstable than the first.
Nathan wraps his arm protectively over the wound. It’s throbbing like a sledgehammer to a pinky, but he thinks the bleeding is slowed. Maybe it’s the cold reducing blood flow. Or maybe Nate is just hallucinating again, and he’s actually drowning in blood. 50/50 odds either way.
As Nate creeps towards the end of the car not free-floating over a 5,000-foot drop, he wonders why he gets himself into these situations. He just had to be the hero, didn’t he? He just had to save Chloe, the ungrateful snot. Why hadn’t she just gone with him? Why couldn’t-?
The ground disappears beneath him, dropping him flat on his face in the snow.
Nathan groans. He’s got a slug in his gut, slowly bleeding him dry, at least three concussions, and what is probably a fair bit of internal bleeding, and yet, the thing that’s going to kill him is the cold. He’s got a shirt and jeans, both soaked with snow and blood. There’s no protection for his head, his neck, his fingers. None of the spots that get frostbite first. Even if he gets out of this alive, he’s not sure all his fingers and toes will.
The wind is relentless as he climbs onto his feet and carries on up the mountain. It blows through him, his clothes like wet tissue paper. He chokes on the air, so cold that it hurts just to breathe.
And then he spots it, sticking out of the ground, in all its millennium-old glory (give or take a couple hundred years). The phurba, the thing Nate has fought tooth and nail to hang onto, is right there in the snow. There’s no giant dude with fists the size of hams in front of it. There’s no artillery or blades defending it. It’s just there, out in the open.
Maybe it’s relief. Maybe it’s just bone-deep exhaustion. Regardless, Nate falls to his knees and grabs the phurba, crawling over to a large rock and falling back against it. He’s in… just… so much pain right now. Is it all worth it for this ritual dagger?
There’s a roaring from behind the rock, and Nate glances over his shoulder to see two military trucks headed his way.
“Ah, crap,” Nathan groans, tucking the phurba in his belt and pulling his gun. “Here we go…”
---
Nate tries to stay as stationary as possible when taking out Lazarević’s guns, quietly whacking them over the head with his revolver and dragging their bodies to the side. This is generally a terrible technique, because if you stack up enough unconscious people in one spot, they do start to become a signal to the conscious people that there’s a threat nearby.
That’s exactly what happens to lead Nate to hiding inside a train car, jamming his gun between the gaps in the siding and shooting anything that moves. It’s not the most efficient way to do things, but with the small pile of unconscious people, he’s got enough ammo to take out ten graveyards’ worth of zombies. So slowly, one-by-one, Nate whittles down his opponents until it’s just him firing at one of the downed gunmen’s helmets, which fell off and proceeded to roll back and forth in the wind. It’s actually embarrassing how long it takes him to realize he’s fighting imaginary demons.
But once he’s done with that, Nate decides that the next course of action is either to die or climb the mountain until he finds help. He doesn’t know why he expects there to be help in the mountains, but he doesn’t have much other hope to go off of. He doesn’t have a phone, his fingers are officially blue, and he’s just…
It’s getting really hard to think.
Nathan starts climbing, trudging through knee-deep snow and trying very hard not to think about how tired or dizzy or cold he is. He walks for what feels like miles, but if he just keeps moving, he’ll be alright. As long as he doesn’t stop-
Nate doesn’t mean to fall. It just happens. And then, when he tries to stand up, he just falls again. So, okay, time to start crawling. He drags himself through the snow another few yards.
Then his head gets too heavy to hold up, and Nate’s face smacks into the ice, the cold burning his skin and freezing his lips. It hurts to lie here, but it hurts even worse to walk, so Nathan doesn’t move. He tells himself that he’s just resting his eyes. Just building up the strength to walk again.
But Nathan doesn’t rise again. His world fades to black, and all he can think about is how mad Elena is gonna be that he went off and died in the middle of nowhere.