????

The pain in Nathan's body recedes, though the uncomfortable burn of the fiery cold lingers—that supernatural undercurrent from before, returning with a vengeance. Nathan gasps, coming to his senses again as the sound bounces off the worn walls around him. His vision is restored to him and he looks around frantically from the spot where he'd been sitting on the floor; he hasn't moved an inch since that brief blackout.

How long was he unconscious? A few seconds? Minutes? Hours? He makes to check his phone, but refrains when an important realisation hits him so hard it could've knocked his teeth out.

Where the hell is Jamie?

Nathan's heart sinks. Wherever she is, she isn't here, and Nathan knows her well enough to be certain she wouldn't just abandon him in an obvious moment of danger and need. If she's gone, something happened to her. And given their current precarious situation, it can't be anything good.

Nathan almost trips over his own feet while getting up and stumbling forward, springing into action without a moment's hesitation. The aches that plagued him before have dulled, though he'd have rushed to find Jamie even if they hadn't. Please, let her be okay. Nathan refuses to lose her, would go through that excruciating pain from before a thousand times over if that guaranteed she'd return to him alive and well.

Part of his reason for coming here in the first place was to protect her, to make sure she wouldn't have to face any dangers alone. He had one job. Just one, and he couldn't fucking do it. The moment it mattered, he, what, just up and passed out? And now...

Fuck. Fuck. If the worst of the worst has come to pass, he'll never forgive himself as long as he lives.

He rounds the dead end corridor's corner, contemplating whether he's desperate enough to risk calling out Jamie's name, and abruptly halts. There's a man standing in the corridor with his back turned to him, illuminated by the flashlight of Nathan's phone. Nathan wonders where the fuck this guy came from. Did he just arrive on the island for purposes similar to his and Jamie's or was he here all along?

Nathan still feels terribly cold.

But it doesn't matter. None of it does. There's really only one question he wants to hear answered. One person he cares about finding.

"Hey, man." He takes a cautious but determined step forward, never taking his eyes off the man's hoodie-clad back. "I don't know if you speak English, but I'm only going to say this once. If you saw a woman with lavender hair anywhere, you're going to bring me to her, and if I find out you've hurt her in any way, I'm going to do whatever you did to her to you. Capisce?"

The man doesn't reply. Instead, he sprints forward, away from Nathan, and the latter has no idea if he's meant to follow or if this bastard is hoping to escape him. He curses and gives chase, pushing through the last of the discomfort in his body. He still feels a supernatural presence and a suspicion that the man he's running after isn't a flesh-and-blood human being dawns on him.

That, too, makes no difference to him. He'll find a way to fight a ghost if he has to. He will.

"Talk to me, asshole!" he yells after the man as they race through shadowy halls together, past empty rooms falling to ruin around them and piles of debris strewn about the floor. Nathan grits his teeth in frustration; no matter how fast he forces himself to run, he never seems to be closing the distance between him and the man, never has the guy within arm's reach. He feels toyed with, like he's being sent on a wild goose chase across the asylum.

But to what end?

They pass a broken window, the slivers of moonlight creeping in highlighting a subtle translucency to the hoodied man.

Nathan is indeed chasing a ghost.

"What's the point of this? Where the fuck are you going?" Talk to me, damn you, give me something to work with here. "Do you know where Jamie is or not?"

He still doesn't receive an answer, but the man spins around and stops as suddenly as Nathan did before. Nathan would've used this moment to pounce and see exactly how much damage he could hope to do to a spectre if the sight of the ghost's face didn't startle him so much. He halts himself, too, stunned.

The ghost is far younger than Nathan expected him to be—he can't have been a day over twenty when he died. The emotion in his brown eyes is unmistakably panic. But more striking than his eyes are how many visible veins snake through his face, how pitch-black their colour. Looking at him closely now, Nathan notices his hands look the same—deathly pale, covered in eerie black veins and spots.

"Who are you?" he asks, his fury slowly getting replaced by pity for this deceased young man who now seems to emanate terror, who seems less like a malicious killer the longer Nathan studies at him. "What happened to you? What do you want from me?"

The ghost's clothes are dirty, spray paint-stained, green and red meeting on faded grey fabric. When the man adjusts his glasses, he gives Nathan a good look at a tattoo on the back of his hand—a winged lion surrounded by the words Venezia FC. From how deliberate and slow the hand movement is, Nathan gets the distinct impression the ghost wants him to see it. The spirit avoided his gaze before, but when their eyes meet, flashes of memories not his own invade Nathan's mind.

A dirty, disturbing carnival mask. A scalpel raised into the air. An operating table covered in a bucket's worth of blood.

These flashes come accompanied by a voice—one he hears in his head like he did Jinx's months ago, one he instinctively knows belongs to the ghost in front of him.

Non ho abbastanza tempo. Il medico ci ha fatto del male. Il medico uccide. Per favore, aiuto.

Nathan's Italian skills may be limited to a select few words glimpsed in Morales' Little Italy, but he's still shocked to find he knows exactly what those words mean.

I don't have enough time. The doctor has hurt us. The doctor kills. Please help.

It's a recipe for endless confusion. Nathan can't even begin to wrap his head around everything that happened to him in the past few minutes. He doesn't understand, doesn't understand anything at all, and where the hell did Jamie go?

"Not enough time, my ass," he snaps, his stress levels rising once more. "Explain yourself. Who are you, what doctor are you talking about, what are you doing to me–"

The flashing memories fade, but his eyesight grows spotty again, shadows creeping from the corners of his eyes into his field of vision. The nameless ghost's form flickers in front of him, his transparency increasing until he dissolves into the sky. A stinging pain hits Nathan again as he does so, white-hot and intense, and it knocks him out cold once more.

~~

October 15, 2023

When Nathan regains his consciousness this time, he expects to wake up in the hallway where his spectral visitor abandoned him. He doesn't. His eyes snap open and he realises he's lying on a cold, dirty floor, blinking into the darkness. His and Jamie's hideout for the night in that dead-end corridor, where he initially woke up.

He's alone. Jamie is still gone.

Nathan curses again and gets to his feet with some difficulty, overcome by an intense exhaustion. He dusts off his clothes, but is unable to rid himself of the ick. He doesn't feel quite so cold anymore, but he's really certain the Universe is fucking with him. Is he going to go through the same thing over and over again? If this goddamned island and its paranormal nonsense hurled him straight into some freaky time loop, Nathan swears he'll raise actual hell.

He grabs the bags he and Jamie brought and starts on his way out of the corridor, at a more leisurely pace this time. Whatever just happened to him, it left him intensely tired, so he'll conserve his energy for when he truly needs it. Should that stupid ghost get in his way again, he'll ignore him and resume Mission Finding Jamie. He'll have none of this time loop shit and he won't give whatever is out there messing with him the satisfaction of watching him panic and squirm.

But when he rounds the corner this time, the ghost isn't there at all.

Huh.

Nathan keeps on walking through the dark, thrown for quite the loop now that his time-fuckery theory has gone out the window. He stops, alarmed, when he hears footsteps. Frantic ones coming in his direction. Fear surges through him, but he holds his ground, partially reassured by the lack of pain in his magic scar. Before, he felt a strong malicious presence, but that terrible sensation has left him now.

So maybe....

Nathan isn't the most optimistic person out there, but he for once doesn't fight the tentative hope rising in his chest.

The footsteps grow louder and louder, and then Jamie suddenly shows up in his phone's flashlight; she lowers her camcorder and stares at him in surprised shock, as if she can't believe her eyes and the fact that he's standing there isn't registering in her brain. For one terrifying second, Nathan doubts his own eyes, overcome by the notion that maybe his supernaturally muddled mind or another ghost is playing tricks on him, showing him exactly who he wants to see in hopes of leading him right into a trap.

But he chases that thought away fast. Upon closer inspection, the Jamie standing in front of him is a hundred percent authentic. Neither Nathan's imagination nor a crafty ghost would be capable of recreating the sheer sublime chaos of the real thing, and Jamie, after what can't possibly have been that long a separation, somehow ended up looking like she just completed a military grade outdoor survival course.

She's red-faced and sweaty and a little out of breath. There's at least one nasty scratch on her cheek and her hair is decorated by a few twigs and leaves she hasn't bothered to pluck out yet. The white T-shirt she wears is no longer white, but unceremoniously dyed in the colors of the forest—moss green and dirt brown stains everywhere.

The more primal part of Nathan's brain decides it's apparently lowkey into this, but now is certainly not the right time to start unpacking that, not while they're on Poveglia and Jamie's still standing there all stunned. The most important question he wants to ask—what happened to you?—sits on the tip of his tongue, but Nathan is still a little out of it, his thoughts trickling through his fatigue like molasses. With what little remains of his eloquence (not that it was impressive to begin with), he manages a solid, "uh... Hi."

Before he can beat himself up over how pitiful that was, Jamie pulls him into a hug so tight it initially startles him, muttering something like thank god you're okay. Nathan relaxes into her embrace and hugs her back, not giving a single flying fuck about the dirt and the grime and the fact they both could stand to take a shower. He just takes a moment to hold her close, enjoy her warmth against his tired body, and if they weren't still in a rather dangerous place, he wouldn't let go for a long time. He could get used to this.

(Being hugged, that is. Fuck the ghosts.)

Jamie releases him far too soon. She hasn't stopped radiating distress. "We need to get to the water right away."

Nathan is mentally still lost wandering the foggy lands of getting touched by the girl of your dreams. "Did the camcorder get a little crushed just now or...?"

Jamie sends him a look that screams seriously, Nate, the fucking camcorder?, but she gives her beloved device a quick once-over nevertheless. She snatches her own bag from Nathan and stuffs the camcorder inside. Then, she grabs his hand and tugs him in the direction Nathan vaguely remembers leading to the entrance they used to get into the asylum; he himself was the one who decided he preferred to set up camp relatively close to it. His feet get a move on, though putting one in front of the other takes up so much energy Nathan feels like he's walking around with lead in his shoes.

"We have a lot to discuss, but it has to wait, okay? We, we have to get out of here. You were right. Something dangerous was coming." Jamie has to be tired herself, too, but adrenaline and a strong desire to flee seem to keep her going. Nathan lets her guide them to their destination, anxious to keep up and not lose her again. He doesn't trust himself or his own senses in this cursed place. The sounds, the shadows—he isn't picking up on them as fast as he should be able to anymore.

But Jamie is still on high alert, and though they steer clear of whatever may still be out there intending to haunt them, she remains that way when they're out of the asylum, rushing along the fence that should've kept them out and towards Giovanni's boat. Far too many questions sit trapped in Nathan's head, both about his own encounter and the one Jamie must have had, but his tongue feels as heavy as his feet and his mouth might as well have been sewn shut. It's hard enough to stay upright, to keep walking through the dark, and Jamie said later, anyway.

Nathan hasn't checked the time since he first woke up, but, to his intense relief, the half hour Giovanni needed to return to Poveglia has passed. When the light spilling from Jamie's smartphone proves the boatman's presence, sheer happiness restores some of Nathan's lost energy. Giovanni sits in his boat, waiting with patience in blissful ignorance of the night's horrors, and looks up when his two peculiar passengers come to a halt in front of him, dirty and exhausted and absolutely terrified.

"Well, I'll be damned," the boatman says with a wry smile. "You kids look like you've seen a ghost."