October 18, 2023

What part of 'wait for me' was so damn hard for you to grasp?

Those words tell Nathan all he needs to know. He messed up. Big time.

"I had a– I had a good reason," he stammers in a meek attempt to explain his own stupid actions.

"Did you now?" Jamie's tone is as sharp as the Doctor's fingernails. She turns, scathing glare swiveling from him to the revenant. "I'd just love to hear all about it the second we get out of here."

Except the chances of getting out are slim. Jamie stands between Nathan and the Doctor protectively, but without a weapon, she'll be no match for it. Not when all the violence Nathan's fists unleashed never even made a dent. And he'll be of no help to her in the state he's in, with so much warm blood dripping down his arm.

Two against one, yet they don't stand a chance.

The Doctor, having recovered from its shock, slinks back to the stairwell, its malicious presence blocking off their only way out. Bloodstained yellow teeth bare into a grin. The creature's head is cocked to the side in a playful fashion. It stands and awaits Nathan and Jamie's next move as if this is all a game.

A game it knows is rigged in its favour.

"We'll talk about it." Nathan groans in pain as he pushes himself to his feet with his good arm. "But we'll have to get past that thing and out of here first. And not to be a cynic, but I'm not sure we still can."

"Oh, we sure as fuck still can. You're just too busy thinking inside the box to notice it." Jamie takes a defiant step in the Doctor's direction. "Be prepared to take a little risk. If you want to live, you do exactly what I'm about to do. No apprehensions. Got that?"

Nathan isn't in any position to criticize whatever idea she has, though her getting closer to the Doctor causes him significant anxiety. Get away from there, he wants to shout, but his efforts to protect her have already backfired once today. He needs to trust she has this covered.

But what if? Nathan lacks confidence as he trails after her. He thinks he knows what trick she's about to pull—the same one he saw on the camera footage she brought back from Poveglia. Storm at the revenant, take it by surprise. Rush past and down the stairs.

Who's to say that will work a second time?

They could both die in this house if it doesn't. Nathan has only himself to thank for that.

He startles out of his doom-thinking when Jamie stops in her tracks, right as the Doctor is getting poised to strike.

"I think you had the right idea a century ago, Doc," she says. "Stairs are overrated. It's way faster to jump."

She pivots on her heels, racing back to the windows at lightning speed. The Doctor screeches in confusion—confusion equalling split seconds of extra time. On instinct, Nathan sprints after Jamie, panic creeping into his heart. Don't do it don't risk it what the fuck you're insane you don't even know if it's deep enough–

If Jamie is at all plagued by the same concerns, they go out the window as fast as she does. Without a moment's hesitation, she jumps into the canal below.

The Doctor catches on, barreling towards Nathan in a last attempt to keep him in the house. Nathan curses, shoves his fears and worries aside, and follows Jamie into the deep end.

His stomach roils during the fall. Air rushes past him as gravity pulls him down into turquoise depths. A cold, hard shock runs through his body when he hits the water and suddenly finds himself submerged.

Liquid shoots up his nostrils and into his mouth. His eyes, squeezed shut seconds before impact, open while still underwater. Confusion seizes him—the rapid succession of events is a raging maelstrom in his head, one that could drown him if he isn't careful. But there's a more lethal type of drowning he must save himself from first. He swims up to the surface.

At least the canal was deep enough.

Jamie is fine—that's the first thing Nathan notes when his head is above water again, when sunlight once more warms his face. She's already managed to clamber into Gino's boat, working frantically at untying the docking rope.

Nathan coughs and snorts. Swimming with a wounded arm in painfully brackish water turns out to hurt like hell. Eager for the pain to end, he steels himself and forces his body to return to the house's entrance with all the speed it can muster. He hoists himself up on the stone first, then almost falls back into the boat. Out of the water, he can finally address the maelstrom properly.

"Did you seriously just jump into a Venetian canal from the second floor of a building?"

"You did it, too, and it's the reason we're still alive, so what about it, huh?" Jamie throws her untied rope for him to catch with a little too much force. "Get. Us. Out of here. I'm not paying a fine for that canal plunge on top of everything else."

Nathan wasn't planning on lingering so close to the Doctor's Venetian lair, even knowing the bastard won't step out into the sunlight. He dredges up the knowledge Gino imparted this morning, starts the boat and hightails it out of there.

He doesn't know where exactly he intends to go. It just has to be a quiet place, away from the prying eyes of locals and tourists alike. Away from the revenant he failed to kill.

The worst may be yet to come.

Jamie sits in the boat restlessly as they speed across the water, wringing half the canal out of her hair and muttering under her breath—unbelievable, fucking idiot, many more such flattering things. Her mood hasn't improved one bit by the time Nathan needs to catch his breath.

He kills the boat's engine on a canal so narrow the centuries-old houses boxing them in could induce claustrophobia. Jamie has taken to checking her watch for water damage as if her life depends on it.

Her goddamn watch, of all things. Nathan worries he might have broken her.

"Hey, uh, maybe your, maybe your phone is a bigger concern than your watch," he suggests sheepishly. He's just throwing something out there, unsure what to say or where even to begin. "Both our phones are probably wrecked, but maybe there's still something to be salvaged if we put them in rice–"

"Do you really think I care about our phones right now?"

"You... You seemed to care about the watch, so I thought the tech–"

"I'm forgetting all about the watch as we speak. What the fuck were you thinking, Nathan?" Nathan has never heard or seen Jamie so full of distraught rage before; not even when she found out he'd been keeping her in the dark about his not-so-legal former line of work. "I didn't even– the water taxi didn't even take that long! Do you know what 'safety in numbers' means?"

"I thought I could decapitate the Doctor in advance," Nathan defends, guilt-ridden. "That I could get the hardest part out of the way by myself."

Blood still drips from the bite wound on his arm, mingling with the water they've collectively sloshed into Gino's boat. Both vehicle and limb will need a good cleaning-and-disinfecting session once they're back in their hotel.

Nathan picks up the knife he bought and left in the boat, peels part of his wet T-shirt away from his skin, and cuts right through dark green fabric. It was ripe for the trash after the Doctor's treatment, anyway, and he needs to ensure the rest of his blood remains inside his body.

"Why the hell would you want to do that?" Jamie would've paced the length of their hotel room five times in a single minute if she wasn't stuck on a tiny boat surrounded by water. "Let me break the situation down for you: I explicitly tell you I'm coming to help, and you say you wait, but once I'm where I'm supposed to be, I find you this close to getting yourself killed. Which was kind of, you know, the exact thing I wanted to avoid by going in together? This bullshit about wanting to do the hardest part by yourself... Why? Has my family finally convinced you I'm untrustworthy and incompetent or what?"

Nathan would never be able to think those things about Jamie—her stress level must be through the roof if she's entertaining the thought he could. But he is seriously stressed himself as well, and something about her erroneous assumption he'd be capable of holding her in such low esteem hurts more than his wound. I meant well, didn't I? I tried to do something good.

You're the worst thing that could've happened to her.

"No! I was trying to protect you!" He isn't proud of the fact he's raising his voice. "Because it's my fault the Doctor is after us, so he's my problem. I shouldn't be putting you in any more danger than I'm already putting you in just by being here with you. I don't want you to get hurt, and people I care about have already died because of me, so I can't lose you, too, Jamie! You're too important..."

"And you aren't?" Jamie isn't as easily intimidated as Gino, for she raises her voice right back. "You call this a good reason, but it's not, Nathan. It's fucking unfair is what it is. You can't lose me, but it's totally okay for me to lose you? No. This isn't your problem—it's been our problem from the start! When are you going to get it into your thick skull that you matter, too?"

"I–"

"I'm not done yet. Listen the fuck up. If being around you is a risk, I'm willing to take it, because you're worth that, alright? Because you're worth that, and I care about you and you're important to me. I'm still here with you because it's what I'm actively choosing, and you don't. get. to make my choices for me. Not even if it's coming from a place of caring. And if you care about me, you better start caring about yourself, because I can't lose you, either. Understood?"

Jamie is right. Nathan shouldn't have let a subconscious version of Derek intent on confronting him with his darkest insecurities and fears get the best of him. There are plenty of reasons he pulled a trigger on the real Derek half a year ago. Derek was a nasty sleazebag who filled his head with lies, dragged him into misery and only ever made him feel valued when it suited his own goals.

He killed Derek because Derek thought he knew him. Because the bastard thought he could control who Nathan Devereaux was for the entirety of their pathetic lives.

But he didn't. And he can't.

Nathan got out because he wanted to do better, not to let Derek continue to control him from beyond the grave. He needs to fight this, appreciate the person he's been becoming a little more. If he doesn't, he suddenly realises, the version of Derek the magic in his system keeps conjuring up will simply continue doing what the real Derek always did—kick him down when he showed signs of wanting to crawl up, make him sabotage his own shots at building a better life in order to keep him down in the gutter with the rest of the rats.

Nathan can't let that happen. He has to deal with this new Derek the same way as the old one. Be more selective in who he listens to, as well. No matter what Derek said, he never once had Nathan's best interests at heart.

Jamie has done more for him in six months than Derek did in ten years. And if she cares about him enough to be yelling about it in public, he must've done something right. There has to be something good within him, something worth preserving.

If Jamie can believe that, he should be able to do so, too. He'll make serious work of it. And he'll tell her as much—later, when his pain has receded and their adrenaline has ebbed away.

"Understood." It's all he can bring himself to put into words. "I'm... I'm sorry."

Before Jamie can accept or discard his apology, a woman on a passing boat interrupts. "Va tutto bene tra voi due? Avete bisogno di aiuto?"

Even in this secluded back-canal, there is no true privacy. They're drawing too much attention to themselves. How couldn't they? Look at us. Shouting, bleeding, soaking wet and shaken to the core.

"Molto bene," comes Jamie's flat-voiced reply. "No necesitamos... aiuto. Pero grazie."

Nathan would normally make a lighthearted inquiry about the Spanish-to-Italian ratio in those sentences, but neither of them is in a mood for jokes. The woman nods and moves along, though the concerned glances she throws over her shoulder inform Nathan they ought to be returning to their hotel, lest someone calls the authorities to come check in on them.

Jamie comes to the same conclusion. "Let's go back." She fidgets with her watch some more, frustrated, shivering when the breeze picks up. "Jesus Christ, it's cold."

It is cold, Nathan has to agree as he manoeuvres them back to their hotel, the world around them smothered in tense silence. Colder than he thought this vacation could become.