a_littlefaith | (no subject)

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nate

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Beth hears about Nate being in the hospital pretty much first thing when she wakes up and turns on the TV in her living room, flipping to the news as she eats a bowl of cereal. It's a pretty big story, a burning building, a man bursting out of the flames with a woman in his arms like some kind of superhero. A few of the reporters and camera men had gotten close enough to the scene to actually capture the face of the man coming out, coughing and covered in soot, and Beth stares for a moment, her spoon halfway to her mouth, then drops the entire bowl of cereal in the sink and heads for the door.

She's not family. She's not allowed to go in and see him. The nurses seems to take pity on her, though, seeing the worry in her face, and they tell Beth that he's fine. He's being treated for smoke inhalation and minor burns and that she can come back in a few hours. Leaving seems impossible and so instead she finds herself in the waiting room, her legs crossed, one foot bouncing, waiting to be told she's allowed to go in and see him.

Only it doesn't quite work out like that. It's a few hours later and Beth is getting up to go ask the nurse if she's allowed in yet when Nate comes walking into the waiting room himself, looking for all the world like he doesn't even see any of the other people around him. Only then does it occur to Beth that the woman he'd carried out of the building was probably Chloe. At the time she had seen the report on the news, she hadn't been paying attention to anything else, just to Nate, but she can't figure any other explanation. And it's no wonder he looks as distracted and worried as he does. When someone needs to be carried out of a building, that's generally not a good sign.

Pushing out of her chair, Beth goes to him, reaching out to gently touch his arm. She'd been so scared for him, even after having the nurses tell her he would be fine, and before she even says anything, she wraps her arms around his waist and presses herself to him in a tight hug.

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It's been hours of people asking him questions and pushing oxygen masks on him and all Nate wants to do is tell them to leave him alone so he can go and see Chloe. They won't let him though, so he's forced to spend a few hours being fussed over, people dressing the burns like he hasn't dealt with plenty worse on his own before, telling him they need to make sure he can breathe properly like he hasn't been doing it his whole damn life. Eventually though, they let him go, only the first thing they tell him is that he can't see Chloe yet.

He knows exactly how bad her injuries are but they won't tell him anything else, won't tell him if she's stable or if she's recovering or if she's woken up at all yet. Instead they tell him to come back tomorrow, which just pisses him off even more. By the time they send him back out into the waiting room he's in something of a daze, the last few hours having passed in a whirlwind that he can't make any sense of yet. He knows someone set fire to the building they were in, knows that Coop had gotten safely out and that Chloe hadn't been so lucky, but most of the rest of it is a blur.

He's barely paying attention as he staggers back into the waiting room, but then somebody touches his arm and by the time he works out who it is Beth is already wrapping her arms around him. He doesn't know how she's here or why but right now he doesn't care. He pulls her closer, buries his face in her hair and tries to focus on breathing for a moment, like the damn doctor had told him to. He's not about to fall apart at the seams, but for a minute he's absurdly glad that she's here, that somehow she knew where to find him and that he'd need her. He already knew Beth was far too good for him, or anybody, but right now he's pretty sure she's an angel.

"Where'd you come from?" he asks, pulling back enough to look at her properly. "How are you here?"

"It was on the news," Beth says, looking up at Nate without unwrapping her arms from around him. She hadn't realized just how frightened she was for him until she'd seen him here in the waiting room and now she doesn't want to let go. In the past five years, she's lost way too many people and she's not even close to ready to lose someone as important to her as Nate has become. They've both been a little busy lately and she knows she hasn't seen him as often as she would have liked, but she's here now. She'll stay here all day with him if he wants her to.

"I guess the fire attracted some reporters and they got you comin' out of the building on camera. I saw... you looked rough and she... are you okay? Is Chloe okay?"

Beth doesn't know her, not at all, but she knows Chloe is important to Nate. She knows he cares about her a lot, probably more than he'll ever say and she knows if something bad happens to her, especially if he was there at the time, he'll never be able to forgive himself.

That's not good. He figured that a burning building was going to attract more attention than they would have liked, given what they were there for, but news coverage isn't ideal. He'd given the paramedics some vague story, told the doctors and the police the same when they came to investigate at the hospital, but the last thing any of them need is somebody working out why they were really there.

His first priority had been to get Chloe to the hospital and most of his attention is still with her, worrying about whether she's going to be okay. But if they do all pull through this in the end, now there's going to be the issue of the story getting out, people digging around into what the building contained and what three people might have been doing there in the middle of the night. Plus, they apparently have his face on camera.

"I'm fine," he says quickly, because he doesn't want Beth worrying anymore than she should. He's still surprised that she's even here, that she'd come all the way to find him as soon as she'd seen it on the news. "Couple burns, nothing serious." Chloe is another story, and for a moment he doesn't know how to answer. The look on his face probably says most of it for him, but he shakes his head anyway. "They've got her in emergency. She lost a lot of blood."

There's a hell of a lot of it on his clothes, for starters, and he still hasn't had time to go home and change. He knows he looks like shit, covered in both of their blood and ash and dirt, but all of that had seemed secondary.

Beth doesn't ask Nate what they were doing, what happened, because she doesn't think it's any of her business and she figures he's going to have to deal with enough of that anyway when it comes to the police. Hopefully they'll focus on the fire and not on the people in the fire, but Beth has to figure it wasn't all above board and a part of her is a little worried they're going to get into some kind of trouble.

But then, not much else is more trouble than the state Chloe is already in, it seems.

"Jeez, Nate," she says softly, then reaches to take his hand, leading him to some of the chairs to sit down. In his state, she figures he's just going to pace this room until someone shouts at him to chill out and she doesn't think that will lead anywhere good. Maybe she can't help him much, but she can at least keep him from going crazy until he's allowed to see Chloe, because she has to keep faith that she's going to be okay.

"You got her out, though," she says. "The doctors here are good, they'll be able to help her."

Beth knows what kind of man he is, knows the kind of things he'd done back home, the kind of life he'd carved out for himself. She must know that he wasn't in that building for legitimate reasons, but it's a blessed relief that she doesn't ask any questions about it. He's not necessarily planning on hiding it from her; he trusts Beth more than almost anyone in this city, and he knows it's not like she'd go and rat them out. But this isn't his gig, his score, and he knows Chloe wouldn't want anyone else to know.

She'd been pissed enough when he'd told Coop, and Coop is one of them.

Beth reaches for his hand and Nate follows automatically, letting her lead him to a chair and then sinking down onto it. His limbs hurt, he's only just beginning to be aware of it. He sprawls in the chair, tips his head back against the wall and tries to let all of the worry and tension and exhaustion bleed out of him. It's not going to work, not until he hears that Chloe is okay, but he tries.

"Barely," he admits, and shakes his head. It had been too close, far too close for comfort, and for a minute he'd worried that he wasn't going to get either of them out. He should have convinced her to leave earlier, long before the fire got bad, before the floor collapsed. They've been in bad situations before, but they've never cut things that close. "We're usually more careful, but this... It was bad, Beth."

Now isn't the time to tease Nate about his feelings for Chloe, Beth knows better than to do something like that, but they're written so plainly on his face and in his words that she squeezes his hand gently before letting go. The situation between them is complicated, she knows that, she knows Nate is technically married, but it's so clear how much he cares about Chloe.

If something happens to her, something worse than the state she's already in, Beth isn't sure what Nate will do. She doesn't want to think about that.

"She'll be okay," she says. "I know I don't really know her, but even just passin' her in your hall, I could see she's tough." She'd have to be, to do the sorts of things Nate has done. And Beth thinks that's probably a thing that appeals to him in women, too, that innate ability to take care of herself. So she's tough. She has to be. And that means she'll be okay.

Because, for Nate's sake, she has to be.

There's no way that either of them can know she's going to be okay, but Nate lets himself believe it anyway, lets himself trust what she's saying because it's all he can do. If he lets himself just sit around in this waiting room alone and worrying he'll drive himself crazy.

For the most part, Nate has made a life of being able to shake things off before they touch him. He can convince himself he doesn't care about most things, let them roll off his shoulders and laugh. But this is different. This is Chloe, this is something he does care about, more than he should, probably, and that's where Nate's always had trouble. When it counts, he doesn't do all that well left alone inside his own head. In the past he always had Sully to bail him out, to pep talk him, to play the more serious side so that Nate could pretend to joke everything away.

Sully isn't here though and Chloe is in a hospital bed, and everything is going to shit, like always.

Chloe is tough though, that's what he needs to remember. She's not the kind of woman to let this get one over her, and it makes him smile a little that Beth could tell that from a glance. "She told me she met you," he muses, rolling his head to the side a little to look at her. She'd called her a mini Elena, a small little barb for a situation she'd misunderstood, at the time. "She liked you." For all that it had been a little dig at Nate, he knows that in the end Chloe had come to respect Elena, and she'd meant it as a compliment, in her own way.

"I mean, it was mostly just a passin' in the hallway outside your place," Beth says with a soft laugh. And mostly all she'd done, for her part, was stare, because she's not sure she's ever seen anyone who looks like Chloe. There are a lot of really amazingly attractive people here, her former boyfriend had definitely been among them, but there's something else about Chloe. Beth's not sure she's met anyone she could peg as being so obviously confident in just a few quick seconds.

"You got her out and she'll be okay," she says again, then leans her head against Nate's shoulder. "And you should probably tell her how much she means to you."

While it's true she doesn't know all the details of what Nate might do to make money in Darrow, she's always had a pretty good idea it's not exactly safe and she thinks today more or less proves it. And she doubts something like this is going to stop either of them, no matter how close a call it might have been. And if they're going to keep doing this, she thinks they both need to know.

That's the sort of thing someone regrets when it's too late.

Beth leans her head against his shoulder and Nate tips his head back, slings an arm around her shoulders to pull her in. He doesn't know what he did to deserve a friend like Beth, someone who's been here for him since day one, but he's grateful for her. For all that he teases her about being a kid, he's pretty sure she's smarter and more mature than he'll ever be, than most people he knows.

It's why he doesn't just immediately push her away when she tells him to tell Chloe how he feels. He doesn't respond straight away either, mulling the thought over in his head. He knows that it's a conversation they're going to have to have now, after everything Chloe said on the brink of unconsciousness. They've danced around it for months, but it's finally time for things to come up, he just doesn't know how to do it.

He still doesn't know what to say to her. Nate knows how he feels, knows it had been even more solidified when he'd watched her fall through that floor, been terrified that he was going to lose her. It had taken the same thing to spur him into action with Elena, and Nate doesn't know that he likes the fact that it apparently takes a near death experience for him to get his shit together, but that's where it stands. He's still worried though, about her running away, leaving him alone in another bed when he wakes up, even after all of this.

They've never stopped to consider what they are to each other, and he knows there's always going to be the Elena complication. He's still technically married, though it becomes a thing that seems further away with every day he remains in Darrow. He doesn't know what would happen if Elena turned up here, he honestly doesn't, but he knows Chloe would expect him to go back to her. The interesting thing is that he doesn't know if that's the case, not anymore.

"I think I love her," he says to Beth, and it's the first time he's said the words aloud, but once they're out he can't take them back. He finds he doesn't want to, either. "What are you supposed to do with a thing like that?"

Somehow Beth manages not to laugh, manages not to tell Nate it's been pretty obvious for a little while that he's in love with Chloe, but she does tilt her head up to look at him, her cheek resting against his shoulder. It won't help him much for her to laugh now, even if she does think it's been obvious, because Chloe is still hurt and Nate is still struggling and the only thing Beth wants is for him to be happy.

So she shrugs when he asks what he's supposed to do with something like that and says, "You just feel it. You just love her."

It feels so simple to Beth, but then, she's always been the sort to wear her heart on her sleeve. Nate is more obvious than he likes to think most of the time, but she also knows it isn't easy for him, that he struggles with reconciling the part of him that has all these big feelings with the part that she's willing to bet has every reason to shy away from them.

"You think she feels the same way?" Beth asks. The chances are pretty good Chloe does. Maybe there's nothing for her to be basing this on, it's just a feeling she has, one that says she can see exactly how people like Nate and Chloe would work together.

It doesn't feel like it's that simple to Nate, but then he and Chloe have never been simple. Neither of them were built for this kind of thing, too much has happened in both of their pasts for them to open up this easily. He knows they're trying, that where they are now is leaps and bounds from where they were a few years ago, but it still feels like a lot to come to terms with.

He can count the amount of people he's let this close to him on one hand, and while it's terrifying, he doesn't want to walk away this time. But he's only ever been in this situation once before, and he feels like it had been a whole lot different then. For all that Elena is a hell of a shot and can hold her own like anyone Nate's ever met, she was never built for the kind of life he and Chloe have gotten so used to leading. It was just him who had to adapt then, had to learn to try and settle down, and even then he'd screwed it all up.

With Chloe they both have to learn, and Nate already knows he wasn't very good at it the first time around.

"She said it," he tells Beth, and the reminder makes his stomach flip a little. At the time he'd been too concerned to feel much about it at all, but with some time to think, he can admit that it was nice to hear. All things considered, with everything he knows about Chloe, he knows it would have been a big admission for her, even given the situation. But what if she just said it because she thought that was going to be the end of it? "When I was carrying her out of the building. She thought she was going to die."

"And she wanted you to know," Beth says. That sort of thing makes sense to her. Sometimes it's hard for people to say what they really feel, but she thinks there are times when they realize they might not get another chance and suddenly it's important for them to tell someone. She thinks about Jason, the night when he'd been attacked and how frightened she had been that he would just not be here one day without her having ever said anything to him. That had changed everything for her, even though she knows she should have been thinking that way all along.

Beth never wants to take anything for granted. Not in Darrow. Not when it's all she has.

"Just in case the worst happened, she wanted you to know." She pauses, considering, then continues. "To her, it was worth the risk. If the worst had happened, then you'd just never know, but now that it hasn't, now that she's gonna be fine, you do know and you guys'll have to face that, but... but I'm gonna guess that's probably what she wants." She can't see any other reason why someone would say something like that, not until they really did want to deal with it, want to explore it.

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