An hour later, they sat in Guy's boat as the Nord navigated them around the coast, toward Solitude. They'd packed their things back into the boat as soon as Nathan had finished with the Dawnguard, and the ride had been dead silent the whole time.

That suited Nathan just fine. He was currently fighting back a flood of bad memories, and was in no mood for talking. The only thing that conversation would bring was questions that he didn't care to answer.

Still, if Serana and Guy both didn't stop staring at him like he had grown a Khajiit head on the back of his shoulders, Nathan was going to have an aneurysm. Shouting wasn't that unusual. Ulfric Stormcloak had the Voice. Granted, there hadn't been a Dragonborn for hundreds of years, but wasn't that secondary?

Nathan winced as he pulled his map out of his pack and laid it out on a bench. He had it mixed up. The Dragonborn part was legendary—the shouting part was secondary. He was, after all, a living legend.

That thought made him want to vomit.

The boat lurched as Guy failed to adjust the sail in time, and Nathan frowned as sea spray blotted the edges of his map. Sighing, he folded up the parchment and looked up at his two traveling companions.

"Somebody say something," he managed to bite out.

He almost winced again. Guy was staring at him with a fair bit of awe, as most people did when they found out the truth about who Nathan was. That didn't bother him (at least, not as much as it used to). No, what bothered him the most was the way Serana was looking at him.

It wasn't a glare. It wasn't awe. It wasn't even surprise. It was pity.

It was almost too much his his confused and battered mind to handle. He didn't want pity. He'd never needed it. And he certainly didn't want it from a woman he was in—

Infatuation. He certainly didn't want it from a woman he was infatuated with. That's what he meant to think.

"You're the Dragonborn," Guy repeated.

Nathan rolled his eyes and rubbed his face with one hand. "Yes, I think we've established that."

He knew he was being rude. All things considered, he thought he was doing fairly well at filtering out the more mean thoughts running through his head. It always happened whenever he thought of…certain events.

"Sorry," he muttered. "I'm just sick of the attention." And that was true. Being the Dragonborn was a full time job. Not just with the adventuring, but the fame. It was annoying.

"Why didn't you tell…us?" Serana asked.

She had been going to say "me." Traveling with another companion was going to be new for Nathan, too.

Oh, there were many reason why Nathan hadn't told her. For one, he didn't want her to treat him like most people did when they found out his identity—like he was some entity that needed to be worshipped. Looking back now, he should have known better. She wasn't that kind of person.

But the main reason he hadn't told her was because of all the bad memories it brought up. He felt a flash of anger just thinking about it.

"…it's complicated," Nathan settled for saying. Serana cocked an eyebrow, so he elaborated. "I just…" He sighed. "I don't like everything associated with it."

That look had returned to her eyes, but as he looked closer, he realized that it wasn't pity. It was sympathy—empathy. She understood.

How could she always understand? It was amazing.

"Besides," Serana said, grinning just slightly, "it was fairly obvious."

"What?" Nathan demanded, leaning forward in surprise. "How?"

Her grin widened. "I mean, yeah. When you were teaching me about history, the Dragonborn was the one area you glossed over. And you faced down Durnehviir with no hesitation." She hesitated, and her expression turned mischievous. "Plus, you talk in your sleep."

Immediately, Nathan's ears reddened. Was she referring to the sleeping incident in the Soul Cairn? Despite the flush spreading across his face, he couldn't help but share in the grin.

Guy rolled his eyes and leaned against the sail, snapping Nathan out of it. Instantly, the bad memories battered against his mind again, and his grin vanished.

"We should, uh, plan the route," he said.

—|||||||||||||||||||||||—

Serana woke to the sound of thrashing.

She was on her feet in an instant, drawing her dagger and looking around the sailboat in alarm.

There were no bandits waiting to plunder them. There wasn't even a mudcrab nearby. Guy had anchored the sailboat on the shore of a riverbed, and the sun was just starting to set.

The problem lied with Nathan, who was lying on the floor of the boat. His hood had fallen down, and his face was coated in a thick layer of sweat. He was thrashing almost violently in his sleep, and was muttering nonsense. His face was twisted in pain, and it made Serana's heart constrict in her chest.

Guy was leaning over Nathan, looking concerned. He looked up at Serana as she crouched on the other side of the Dragonborn.

"He's been like this for an hour," Guy told her. "I tried to wake him up, but nothing worked."

Serana's stomach dropped as she looked back at Nathan's tortured form. He looked absolutely miserable, and she felt his pain as clearly as if it were her own.

"Nathan," she said softly, laying a hand on his shoulder and shaking him gently. "Nathan, wake up!"

Under his eyelids, his eyes flickered wildly. Whatever kind of nightmare he was having, it was a bad one. She'd never seen him like this before. She knew that he would occasionally have nightmares—sometimes she'd wake up and hear him muttering nonsense like he was doing now. But nothing had ever worried her like this.

Nathan's body suddenly jerked as he sat upright, screaming at the top of his lungs. "NO!"

He whipped his head around wildly, as if trying to ascertain if the riverbed around them was reality. His whole body was trembling, and sweat dripped down his face in a flood. Yet when he realized that he was no longer dreaming, his body only tensed further.

"Are you all right, Nathan?" Serana asked, touching his arm slightly.

He jumped up as if he had been burned. Had the boat not been anchored and half seated on the riverbed, the whole thing would have tipped over. Nathan stumbled out of the boat and onto dry land like he was drunk, and he nearly fell face-first on the ground. He hesitated for a moment after he straightened, then strode off into the darkness.

Serana and Guy shared a troubled look. Nathan was acting as if he'd just lost a loved one.

"I'll go after him," she said, standing up and carefully stepping out of the boat.

Guy nodded and stood up, grabbing a small knife from off the bottom of the boat and looking around at the night. "I…guess I'll just stay here and guard the boat."

"You'll be fine," Serana told him.

Then she was going after Nathan, worry turning her inside-out.

She didn't have to look far. Only a few hundred feet out, Nathan was sitting on the ground, his back against a large rock. She paused when she saw him.

Nathan was crying.

This wasn't the "single-tear" kind of crying that she had come to expect from men on the rare occasion that they did cry. No, this was full-on crying, with shaking shoulders and loud, gasping sobs that wrenched pain from her chest with every shaky breath he took.

Her heart was thumping painfully when she saw him like that, but she tried to temper her reaction. Instead of running to him and strangling him in a hug, like her automatic reaction wanted, she sat down next to him quietly and put a comforting hand on his shoulder.

That seemed to calm him a bit. He was still crying, but his shaking subsided somewhat, and the miserable look on his face seemed lessened, somehow.

"You want to know why I didn't tell you I was the Dragonborn?" he asked after a few minutes of silence.

Serana said nothing, but she looked up at him. He was staring at a rock in distance stubbornly, as if trying to turn it into gravel with the force of his gaze. His jaw was clenched tightly, and there seemed to be a million different emotions running through his eyes.

Eventually he spoke again, spitting out the words as if they were poison. "It's because whenever I Shout, people die. Lots of people."

That miserable look had returned, and Serana hated it.

She had known that Nathan had something troubling in his past—perhaps multiple somethings—but she'd never pressed him about it. After all, she knew that with her traumatic experiences, talking about it could bring up more pain. But she'd never imagined that Nathan would have something like this—something that engraved guilt so clearly on his usually grinning face.

Nathan leaned his head back against the rock they sat against. "I never told you what the Dragonb—what I did after I defeated Alduin, did I?"

Serana shook her head. She was worried that anything she said would deter him from sharing with her.

He closed his eyes as he spoke. "I was attacked by a group of cultists one day, who accused me of being a 'false Dragonborn.' I went to Solstheim to investigate who had sent them to kill me."

Serana had learned about Solstheim in their history lessons together. Half the island had been covered in ash due to the eruption of Red Mountain, creating a strange series of wildlife. And Nathan had gone there?

She listened in rapt attention as he continued. "I found a cult dedicated to a man named Miraak. And then I found a black book. It was made by Hermaeus Mora."

She almost started in surprise. She hadn't figured Nathan as someone to hang around with a Daedric Prince. Not like she had.

"It took me to Apocrypha, Hermaeus Mora's realm of Oblivion. I learned that Miraak was trying to reenter the world, and that he needed my soul to do it. Hermaeus Mora helped me learn a new shout to defeat Miraak." Nathan squeezed his eyes shut even further. "But there was a price.

"In order to give me the final word of the shout, he asked for the knowledge of a small Nord tribe living in the northern half of the island. They were warriors, but they lived a peaceful life. They were also masters at crafting with stalhrim, a type of enchanted ice."

Nathan reached for the sheath at his ankle and withdrew the dagger he kept there. Serana cocked her head at it. It was a cobalt blue, but it looked as if it had been crafted directly from ice. It radiated a cool temperature, and looked sharp enough to cut through a horker's hide.

"The village shaman, a man named Storn Crag-Strider, gave me this." Nathan chuckled once humorlessly. "He said I needed it to watch my back." He closed his eyes again. "Storn agreed to give up the Skaal's secrets to Hermaeus Mora so that I could learn the final word of the shout. Mora killed him."

There was a ragged emotion in Nathan's voice, and Serana suspected that he had replayed this event countless times in his head. She also suspected that he needed to get it off his chest.

"I defeated Miraak before he could return to the world, but when I returned to the Skaal village…" Nathan trailed off, and the tears started anew. His expression suddenly turned angry, and when he opened his eyes, there was a strange fire burning in them.

"The entire village had been decimated." His jaw was so tight that Serana suspected that not even horker grease could loosen it. "The cultists who followed Miraak had killed them all as revenge. There wasn't a single survivor." He ran a hand through his hair aggressively. "All because I had to learn one more shout."

Ah, Serana thought. The pieces began to fall into place. Nathan tried to avoid shouting and telling people who he was because he felt responsible for the death of an entire peaceful village. No wonder he was so hesitant to tell her.

But hadn't he also told her not to blame herself for the situation with her parents? How could he not see the similarities between these two situations?

"It's not your fault," Serana told him, her voice determined.

He looked down at her, a sad look in his eyes. "How can you say that? If I hadn't been looking for that shout, none of those people would have died."

She shook her head. "It wasn't your fault. You didn't have a choice in the matter, and you couldn't control what those cultists did." She paused. "The whole thing was orchestrated by Hermaeus Mora, Nathan."

He frowned, considering her words. She had no way of knowing whether or not he'd already thought of what she'd just said, but she could see the gears in his head turning.

"You're a good person," she told him, to further reinforce what she already knew. "It wasn't your fault."

Nathan looked away at her words, doubt flickering across his face. "That's…" He swallowed. "I've done some…pretty terrible things, Serana. You wouldn't say that if you knew me when I first came to Skyrim. The Skaal massacre is not the only splotch of red on my ledger."

Serana paused at that. It was hard to imagine Nathan as anything other than the kind, generous person she knew him to be. Hell, he had offered to help Guy, despite the fact that he'd only just met the kid and that he would be helping another Daedric Prince! If he wasn't a good person, then no one was.

She tried her best to give him a reassuring smile and squeezed his shoulder. "The fact that you feel remorse about it should tell you that you are a good person."

Now it was his turn to pause, his face taking on a confused look, as if he hadn't thought of that before. Then, he frowned. "You don't want to know what I did?"

Serana wondered about that for a moment, and then shook her head. "I'm not interested in who you used to be. I'm interested in who you are now." And then, despite the seriousness of the situation, she felt a flush spread across her face. She had made sound like she was interested in him, when she…well, she was, but…not…

She bit her tongue to keep herself from saying something stupid. Right now, Nathan needed a friend, not…whatever else they were to each other. Certainly something deeper than friends, by now. She wondered for a moment how that had happened and then decided that it was actually fairly easy to become…what they were.

"What was your nightmare about?" she asked, partly to distract herself from the melting pot of emotions inside herself.

He looked down at his hands. "I dreamed about the Skaal being massacred. Over and over again, while I watched."

"I'm sorry," Serana said, and she meant it wholeheartedly. For Nathan to have been through something like that, and still be the way he was—goofy, kind, empathetic—was truly amazing. How did he do it? Serana's experiences had made her bitterly sarcastic and closed off. Nathan's seemed to have done the opposite for him. He was…wonderful.

She opened her mouth to tell him as much, but a shout cut through the night—the normal kind.

"GUYS?" It was Guy. "I NEED SOME—OUCH!"

Nathan and Serana shared a worried look before they were on their feet and running off into the night to rescue their wayward boatman.

Wow, guess who's still alive? I am so sorry for the long wait (almost a year? i feel really bad about it), but I had some family things to take care of, plus school (I'm a senior now? wild) and a bunch of other things and I sort of forgot about the story.

But...16,000 VIEWS? HELLO? THANK YOU GUYS SO MUCH EVEN THOUGH I WENT MIA?

*ahem* That being said, I have no idea when the next update will be, since I'm mostly going through and editing the previous chapters so that they make more sense, fixing errors, stuff like that. I've only uploaded the edited chapter one, but it'll definitely be worth a second look (which you might need considering the gap? again, so sorry), b/c I'm adding some parts and taking away others.

And as always, please leave a review for my poor battered writer soul :)