#ribbonreverse

She rests her head on her hand, teeth working her bottom lip. Her eyes search the carpet, then the ceiling. She hovers there for a moment before letting her emotions out. “I just can’t believe him,” she starts, teeth gritting, fingers clenching.

He knows Elena Fisher well enough not to start nodding sympathetically.

“--and you know what, I could have gotten past that. I could’ve. But instead of telling me, he lied to me-- again-- and… I’m just-- I’m so tired of it. He’s always been full of bullshit, but this? This takes the cake.” She exhales through her teeth and glares at the floor, then at him. “And you! Not a word from you about Nate having a brother! What the hell, Victor?”

While listening to her, he’s been picking his words carefully, yet when it comes to it, he still feels unprepared. “Sam was his brother,” he mutters after a moment, half-shrugging. “I figured… it was up to him to bring him up. And you know how it is-- you don’t bring up something big right away, time goes by and it gets harder and harder to bring it up. Gets so it’s hanging over your head. And, hey, if Nate thought he was dead…”

“But nothing?” she presses, leaning into the aisle a little. “Not a word? Not a single reference from either of you that, hey, Nate’s not actually an only child--”

“Losing Sam damn near killed him,” he says bluntly, and waits for her to pause, consider, and inhale before cutting her off. “And I don’t mean that metaphorically or hyperbolically or whatever-the-hell-else-ically. They let him out of the hospital and he all but parachuted back into the damn prison trying to get a different answer. Then once he accepted it, he was-- he was a man possessed. He threw himself into whatever he could find, taking jobs from anybody, didn’t matter who, where, what, or how shady. For probably six months or so, swear to God I thought I was gonna lose him.” He hesitates.

Elena, now halfway into the aisle, watches his face closely and frowns. “And then what happened?” she asks, a premonition in her voice that she already doesn’t like his answer.

Neither does he, but at this point he’s said too much for Elena to drop it. “I… Ah, hell. I took him out drinking, got him good and hammered. I told him he couldn’t keep going the way he was, he cried about it, I made him promise me he’d be more careful, he promised, and afterward… we just… we agreed to never talk about it again.”

Elena stares at him for an excruciating amount of time, a multitude of expressions crossing her face. “You’re fucking joking,” she says finally, flatly. “Sully, what the fuck?”

“I’m not proud of it! But I wasn’t gonna lose him, too.” He pauses, then shrugs. “I don’t know, me and Sam-- we got off on the wrong foot and never recovered. But… I tried, y’know? And we agreed on taking care of Nate, so if he was self-destructing, Sam would’ve wanted me to step in, stop him.”

“By agreeing to never, ever talk about probably the most traumatic thing to ever happen to him.” Elena’s tone is so flat he could build a card tower on it, her sarcasm thick enough to cut with a knife. “That’s perfectly reasonable.” Her indignation pushes her out of her chair and she walks away, running a hand through her hair.

He grimaces and looks away. Reasonable? Bullshit. It was barely workable, and he knew that from the start. He thinks about how Nate didn’t talk to him again for a year, the distance between them he’s still trying to bridge. He can’t count how many attempted conversations have been poisoned by that night, the crushing number of times he’s tried to invite trust only to watch Nate spook and sidle away. He doesn’t need to be a psychologist to see where, when, and in what ways his best intentions have fucked up Nate’s life.

On the other hand, Nate is still around to shrug him off, and in Sully’s world that’s gotta count as some kind of victory.

------

another fire is my favorite work in my uncharted series start here partially bc it’s kind of a microcosm of what i wanted to explore in the series: nathan drake’s life as shaped and viewed by the most important people in it, and how those important people feel about each other, too

like, when sully met nate, nate was on his own. where was sam and how did he react when he met sully? what did he think of sully’s mentorship? it’s clear from dialogue in a thief’s end that they never got along, but what exactly was the nature of their friction? despite their mutual willingness to involve a child in crime, they both do care for him. was their conflict over how best to do that? did sully try to mentor sam and sam resented that? was it bc sam was obsessed with sir francis drake and their great destiny and thought sully would be a distraction? maybe show nate a different way of life? anyway i’m getting off topic

the thing i wanted to explore in another fire specifically wasn’t the interplay between sully and elena (tho that is the platform), it was what happened between nate and sully between their first meeting (which we see in a flashback in drake’s deception) and their interactions in drake’s fortune. being the first game, there’s not a lot of space for nuance, so sully as the cigar-chomping lady-killing might-be-untrustworthy ally whose assumed death upsets but doesn’t devastate nate is just about as frothy and trope-tastic as the rest of the game. i don’t mean that as a criticism, by the way; the surface tropey simplicity is part of why i love these games so much

but that reaction, that nate is sad but not broken, that he’s suspicious when they find out sully survived but not betrayed, makes the fact that they met when nate was a child so much more interesting. sully’s saved nate’s life, more than once! he’s gotten nate out of prison, probably also more than once! he’s been a mentor, a sorely-needed father figure, someone nate has trusted and worked and bonded with for more than a decade. what on earth happened to that partnership before drake’s fortune that left it in such a state?

of course, one could just write it off as “oh, it was the first game- they didn’t have a grand plan in mind” and leave it at that, but i didn’t want to. even before they announced the fourth game i wanted answers, and a thief’s end gave me that answer in sam’s existence, assumed death, and the fact that he’s never mentioned in the other games, not even hinted at, not once*

a post i made ages and ages ago after replaying drake’s fortune and among thieves was that nate’s go-to coping strategy with painful circumstances seemed to be ‘never ever mention the painful thing.’ obviously his brother’s death, right in front of him, in a circumstance that nate very easily could have blamed himself for, more than qualified for never being brought up after the fact. but nate is obsessive, a risk-taker, someone who goes after slim chances based on fragments of information, and he and his brother were pretty codependent. he strikes me as the kind of person who would burn the prison to the ground just to get his brother’s body out bc he wouldn’t want him buried in a prison graveyard in the middle of nowhere. so why didn’t he? why did he give up?

well, if sam had just died, who would nate call? and if sam was dead, how would sully react to nate wanting to hunt down the people responsible?

the disparity between drake’s deception and drake’s fortune was answered: in the aftermath of a world without sam, nate’s self-destruction was only halted by sully stepping in and telling him to snap out of it. was it out of love? fear? self-interest? yes. and having that happen, having his father-figure tell him it sucks that your brother died but i need you to keep going, is another source of pain, another emotional topic that nate has exactly one coping strategy for: silence

so while another fire is, on the surface, about nate entrusting the care of his betrayed wife to his enabling father-figure, the more important issue i wanted to address was why nate would push him away with a request that’s ridiculous at best (elena has gone to active war zones to film a warlord’s ongoing atrocities to convince the world at large that said warlord was, in fact, alive! she did not need an escort between madagascar and the united states) instead of wanting his help, and furthermore why sully would just acquiesce with hardly a word. this scene is the explanation: the ugly, selfish, best-intentions-i-swear reasoning behind the comparative distance between nate and sully in drake’s fortune, and the wedge that knowledge would drive between elena and sully

nate already had to choose sully over sam, to live for his father-figure once his brother was gone. this time he’s picking sam: he isn’t going to lose him again. and his decision to lie to elena about everything, to shy away from telling her any part of the truth, is to some extent rooted in sully’s actions, in the direction he guided nate after the trauma of losing his brother

another fire ends with the characters still in limbo, somewhere over the atlantic on a flight from johannesburg to new york. what convinced elena to turn around and go back for nate, one more time? how was sully involved? at time of writing i didn’t have the answers to those questions and worried that i’d run out of all steam before figuring it out, so i opted to post what i had instead of waiting

sitting here four years later, i’m still wondering

i love uncharted 💖🌄🌊🔫💖