October 13, 2023

It's astonishing, Nathan thinks, how he spent the vast majority of his life never setting foot in a foreign country, only to be able to cross three of them off the bucket list he never knew he had in a single year. Truly remarkable. He actually quite loves travel.

Though maybe not the travel part of travel.

Flights lasting longer than ten hours, in Nathan's opinion, should be swiftly abolished in favour of teleportation machines the world's scientists should just hurry up and invent already (what else is he paying taxes for? Certainly not good medical care). Jet lag-inducing time zones can all fuck off and die in a hole. Landing in Germany only to have to rush to catch the connection to their final destination shouldn't be nearly as stressful as it is. He'd much rather do without all that annoying, exhausting bullshit.

But then, there's Venice, and maybe everything was worth the trouble after all.

Upon touching down at Aeroporto di Venezia Marco Polo, collecting their luggage and figuring out which bus to take to get to the city center, Nathan and Jamie finally get to relax. At least it's just the two of them for now; there are no family members capable of spoiling the fun present just yet, which Nathan considers something of a blessing. It's all courtesy of Jamie, who accidentally misread the departure time for the flight her family booked and got herself and Nathan on a plane leaving a few hours earlier.

Though judging by how easily she shrugged this error off (if we're all going to be spending two weeks in the same hotel, Nate, I'm sure we can survive not taking the same flights), Nathan suspects 'accidentally' was more like 'accidentally on purpose'.

In this case, it suits him just fine.

He soon doesn't have time to think about it anymore. On the ten-minute walk from the central bus station to their hotel, Nathan's far too busy admiring Venice—this ancient city full of visitors so different from what he's used to seeing. There aren't any cars to be found in the city's center, but a myriad of bridges span swaths of canals, the waterways around them sparkling in the warm light of the Mediterranean sun. Colourful, old buildings envelop broad, elegant streets. These occasionally give way to narrow alleys, time-worn and tainted by graffiti, the occasional pizza slices tossed away by careless tourists littering the ground. Every time Nathan thinks his eyes have captured everything there is to see, he finds himself surprised once more.

What a messy, wonderful place the world is.

And the same, Nathan realises as they reach the lively square they need to be at, goes for their hotel.

Mostly just the 'messy' part.

"Hotel Campo dei fiori," Jamie reads from her phone, eyeing the building in front of her with unbridled scepticism. "This... is the right hotel, isn't it?"

It seems to be the case, though Nathan's already wishing that wasn't true. Out of all the buildings ensquaring this square, the low-budget hotel sports the most ramshackle appearance, its... charming facade painted a truly eye-assaulting mustard yellow.

Campo dei Fiori doubles as a small restaurant in the evenings: the outdoor seating area seems cluttered and hastily put together, a style that wouldn't look out of place in Jamie's house back home in Morales. Wannabe-white parasols that could do with some cleaning provide shade for those few people unfortunate enough to call themselves 'guests'. The hotel's signboard, putting its name on display in a hideous shade of green, might as well have been cobbled together by a six-year-old.

Nathan imagines the gateway to Hell looks a slight bit like this.

"I'd like to remind you that you asked me to surprise you," he tells Jamie, dumbfounded. "And you're... definitely surprised right now, so at least there's that...?"

Jamie scrutinizes the building a little longer; her expression is less shocked horror and more morbid fascination. "I dunno if there's such a thing as a Venetian mafia, but if there is one, I'll say this place might be a front. Think the employees are into Poker, Nate?"

Nathan grimaces. "I'm not going to ask them about Poker."

"Oh, fine." Jamie puts her phone away. "So let me guess: the hotel looked better in the pictures?"

"It was the most affordable one I could find and it scored really high on location," Nathan defends his own poor choice, though he has to admit there weren't very many pictures and reviews online. He also only glanced at and skimmed over the ones he did see.

Truth be told, he's barely stayed in hotels in his life and all their accommodations in Iceland had been of such high quality he'd sort of assumed most hotels met those standards by default. Clearly, that isn't how this works.

Jamie looks around, taking in the square they're standing in—its old church and quaint market stalls, a canal with yet another pretty bridge across at walking distance. "Fair enough. This location is kinda fire."

She summons a smile, turning back to their hotel with renewed vigour and enthusiasm. "We should go check in. Who knows, maybe it's all much better on the inside."

~~

It's not better on the inside.

The ground floor, where the reception-slash-bar and additional tables are located, seems just as haphazard as the seating area outside. That same garish green from the signboard graces the walls and the space smells oddly like sawdust, which makes Nathan worry about what the fuck they put into the food here. No matter how social Jamie tries to be, the lady checking them in seems more annoyed than pleased at the presence of these American tourists: her face is a citrus-sour mask that puts Nathan's own neutral expression to shame and she probably utters one word for every ten Jamie says. Nathan is happy when they finally have their keys and get to ascend the narrow, spiralling staircase up to the second floor.

"Here goes nothing," Jamie says cheerfully as she opens the door to their shared room, though she quickly makes the sign of the cross for good measure. "Let's see what we have here."

What they have is a rather tiny space, Nathan decides as he drags the bulk of their luggage inside. A tiny space with an interior that might've passed for modern somewhere back in the 1970s. Just like Nathan's salary, the room provides little but bare minimums: floor tiles that aren't quite spotless, walls that could be either white or yellow, two beds with a nightstand and a small lamp each, one wardrobe, and one chair standing by a wooden desk lightly covered in dust. There's an old TV mounted to one of the walls, but Nathan can't find a remote anywhere.

It's quite the palace.

"It smells better here than downstairs," Jamie points out, somehow still pretty positive about this whole ordeal. Nathan has no clue how she makes it work, but he loves her all the more for it. "And I don't see any mold or bugs, so... This is fine. Any room without roaches is a good one."

The bar is apparently low enough to trip over.

"Don't say that so fast," Nathan replies, not to criticise Jamie's attitude, but just to keep it real. "We haven't seen the bathroom yet."

Small and cheap as the rooms in Campo dei Fiori may be, they do still come with private bathrooms. Nathan suits his actions to his words and makes to check the one at their disposal out, making sure to go in with no expectations whatsoever. Much to his relief, he finds no new horrors inside. The bathroom is as old-fashioned as the rest of the room and the sink is somewhat dustier than it ought to be, but other than that, it's clean. The space won't be winning beauty contests any time soon, but it'll meet every basic need.

Amazing. There's some good left in the world after all.

"See? We can officially declare everything critter-free." Jamie looks past Nathan into the bathroom, grinning. "It's really not that bad. I know this YouTuber who visits hotels with awful ratings, right, and he actually found a pigeon living in one of them."

Nathan blanches. "If I find an honest-to-god pigeon in this hotel, I'll drown myself in the first canal I see."

"Don't you dare. But no worries. I'd say the odds are pretty low." Jamie dumps one of her bags on the bed closest to the window, claiming it for herself. She moves to open the window right after; Nathan expects to be met by the sound of cars racing past out of habit, but it's quiet outside in that regard. "This room comes with a pretty awesome view of the square, too. Nice! But the rest... Man, Stella's face is going to be priceless when she sees this place."

Stella's face. After a gruelling journey and being bombarded with new impressions left and right, Nathan allowed himself to temporarily forget Jamie's family will be joining them here in a few hours at most. He instantly breaks out in cold sweat, throat going dry, heartrate increasing.

He messed this up. He's an idiot, a fool, a good-for-nothing-but-bare-minimums douchebag who can't even book a decent hotel, and Jamie's family will arrive and see this absolute mess of a place and they'll have their minds made up about him for the rest of the trip the moment they learn it's his fault they're stuck here for two weeks.

It shouldn't matter to him, for he doesn't even like Jamie's family enough to value their opinions on this. Still, rejection always hurts, no matter who it's coming from. And, Nathan fears, if her family points out the hotel's every flaw, Jamie may finally see all the good-for-nothingness, too.

So he looks at her with a little too much petrification in his eyes and says: "You mean Stella's going to skin me alive when she sees it and your parents will applaud her when she's done."

Jamie turns to him with a slight frown, though she doesn't appear nearly as stressed about it as he does. "No, they won't. For all they know, I picked this hotel. We don't have to tell them it was you."

"Then they'll just skin you alive instead."

"No, they won't do that, either." Jamie sits down on her bed, cross-legged. "I've known my family for twenty-four years, Nate. These people all come with instruction manuals, but I like to think I know those pretty well."

"...What do you think they'll do, then?"

"Stella's not going to like this hotel, but she'll bite her tongue because letting me choose our hotel was her own idea. All she'll do is regret it in silence. Mom and Dad also won't be too happy this is what we get, but they'll keep their mouths shut, too. Because finding a different hotel would be impossible and far too expensive for them at this point, but also because Stella asked them to keep the peace. And even if we took all of that out of the equation, they'd suck it up and stay purely for the principle of the thing. Walking away from things is like a... a sign of weakness to them or something."

That one instance of Jamie first telling him about her parents kicking her out aside, this is the first time she's giving him this much information about them in so many words. Nathan realises he barely knows a thing about them as people, even though they're going to have to put up with each other for two weeks. He doesn't know anything about their lives or what they're actually like. He doesn't even know their names.

Perhaps now is the right opportunity to ask.

"You said you have your family's instruction manuals figured out. I'll take your word for that," Nathan says, facing Jamie as he sits down on his own bed. "But maybe you can share some of those instructions with me? I still don't have a clue what to expect from any of these people."

"Well, there's Stella–"

"I've met Stella," Nathan says, tone perhaps a little too irritated. Stella Carrera just has that effect on him. "I've got a decent idea of what she's like. I'm more curious about that fiancé of hers, and your parents."

"Fair enough." Jamie bites her lip while she tries to think of where to start. It's kind of adorable. "So Stella's fiancé is Gino, and he's chill. He's nice. Just plain nice. But he doesn't like to be in the limelight all that much. If anyone's going to be causing trouble during this trip, it certainly won't be him."

If that's true, Nathan thinks, Gino likely won't be partaking in the upcoming assassination conspiracy against him and Jamie. "Sounds like a decent guy."

"He is. And so is my father, though he's a little tougher to deal with. He's this hard-working, pull-yourself-up-by-the-bootstraps kind of man. Very stubborn, and he can get livid if you really manage to piss him off. But as long as we make sure not to reach that point, he's pretty okay."

"What's his name?"

"Emilio. He's got an interest in cars—he's a mechanic—so if you're ever at a loss for what to say to him, just throw a fun car fact in his direction and that should be enough to get some sort of conversation going."

Car facts. Good to know. Nathan nods. "Noted. What about your mother?"

"Oh, she's... interesting." Jamie pulls the bag she placed on her bed closer to her and starts rummaging through it absent-mindedly. "Her name's Linda and she's probably one of the most social people you're ever going to meet."

"I thought it couldn't get much more social than you."

"Think again. Mom's been working in my old hometown's library for as long as I can remember and she meets a lot of people that way. So she's always involved with these community initiatives and events, she knows half the world and she's used to gossiping with and about everyone and their grandmother."

"So we're going to get excruciatingly detailed accounts of what all your old neighbours are up to now?"

"Likely. But what I'm getting at is... You know how people often expect to be treated the way they treat others? Mom talks about others a lot. She expects others to do the same about her. And her family by extension, of course. So she feels she's got a reputation to uphold, and, like, this ideal image of her life that she'd like to show the world. She... doesn't really like it when things get in the way of that." Jamie finds what she was looking for: a bag of chocolate bars. "And I guess she's a little like a fence, in a way. Let's just put it like that. Hey, do you want a chocolate bar?"

"Of course I want a chocolate bar. But..." Nathan blinks, confused. "Just back up there for a second. A fence? What even?"

"Think of it a little like this." Jamie opens the bag and throws him a chocolate bar; Nathan tries to catch it, but it hits his fingers wrong and plummets unceremoniously to the floor. "Imagine you're walking on this path in the mountains. Make it the Grand Canyon, who cares, not me. Now picture there's an abyss to your right and the path is very rocky and narrow, so you're really taking a risk walking there. Luckily, there still is a fence protecting you from the abyss, so you can be on your way without having to worry about anything, because it'll be there to catch you if you're unfortunate enough to trip and fall."

"...When did you come up with this metaphor?"

"Ages before we even met. Why?"

"Never mind. A fence for protection? That's all?" If Nathan's honest, that sounds like most mothers he's met in his life. His own certainly had his back no matter what. That's just a Universal Mother Trait, isn't it?

"No. I wasn't finished yet." Jamie stands up, picking at a chocolate bar's wrapping without much enthusiasm. "The fence is a high-voltage electric one, so falling always hurts."

Nathan snatches his own fallen chocolate bar off the floor. "That sounds... worrying. And I want to say I understand it, but at the same time I feel like I don't."

Jamie walks over to the rest of the luggage to be sorted out. "Oh, but you'll get it," she says, a small, almost melancholy smile forming on her face. "You'll get it soon enough."