Written for my 20 Fandoms Challenge, I wanted to do a fic about pre reboot Lara and how I think she's totally aro as hell, so hopefully I was able to do that some justice. A bit of non-explicit femslash.
"Oh, she'll settle down."
Lara loved it when they said that about her. There was nothing she loved more than proving someone wrong. Nothing, perhaps, except doing it with her hands around a relic of some lost people, forgotten to the ages but not to her.
She'll settle down, they told her father. When they found her kissing boys they sent him knowing smiles and told bad jokes, the kind that makes every young woman's skin crawl and every middle-aged man loves to tell. Her father never laughed.
When they found her kissing girls, the jokes were the least of her worries.
Lara was fine, though, in the long run. She had a natural affinity towards martial arts, and she knew how to take care of herself. Richard Croft was on her side, and she went to bed with a lighter heart the night he overheard him telling his mother on the phone, no, you look, it's Lara's life, and I want her to do what makes her happy.
That was the plan, she told herself that night, the covers warm around her as the sounds of her father arguing sent her into her dreams. That was the plan.
"Ever thought about settling down?"
Alister liked to ask those kind of questions and pretend he was joking. Lara was no idiot, and she wondered if could possibly think that she fell for it.
"You sound like my father's friends," she said, not bothering to look up from cleaning a set of pistols.
Alister frowned. "That's not a compliment, is it?"
"No," she said. "It's not."
Zip snorted, shaking his head. He was sitting at his computer, at least attempting to do the work she paid him to do. At least one of them was.
"Do you think I'm going to be settling down with you?" she said, looking up and cocking an eyebrow. She pursed her lips, the expression ending in a smirk. "Is that what you'd like?"
Zip was no longer paying attention to his work, but rather Alister's red face. Zip had never asked a pointless question like that; he never world. To be frank, she rather preferred Zip.
"I think you should disillusion yourself of that possibility right now," she said, finishing up her work on the pistols and swinging one in her fingers.
"Duly noted," said Alister.
She smiled. Alister did too, but somehow it didn't seem quite as genuine.
Her breath was harsh in her own ears, eyes fluttering shut as the other woman pressed a line of kisses up Lara's collarbone, stopping to leave a mark or two along the way. She arched her back at the feeling of the other woman's hands, fingers gripping her sheets.
She loved this. She loved the way it made her feel.
When they were finished, when her arm was wrapped around the other woman's shoulder and the blanket was pulled tightly around them, the woman turned Lara's face towards her and said in a very serious voice, their eyes meeting, "Have you ever thought about settling down, Lady Croft?"
They both laughed, and Lara slept well.
"You probably don't have time for romance spending all your time in the jungle," said the bookstore owner, peering at her through his glasses.
Oh, this again. She did so tire of these old white men and their insistence on pigeonholing her. She smiled at him as thinly as her face could manage and said, the very specific kind of friendly tone she reserved for these conversations saturating her voice, "I don't need romance and I don't think that's any of your business either way."
He hiked up the price on the book she was buying, so she bought the building he lived in before heading out of the city. They said revenge was pointless, but Lara had somewhat different experiences with that particular matter.
Sometimes Lara liked to crash parties.
Oh, it wasn't technically crashing, because Lady Lara Croft still garnered invitations to soirees and balls by the dozen, sometimes not despite her reputation but because of it. But no one actually expected her to attend them.
She liked to arrive in the same clothes she'd wear to the middle of the jungle and talk to the other women about things they had half-forgotten they'd loved, things they'd been interested in before society had stifled them. She would leave these parties stuffed with hors d'oeuvres and a few acquaintances that would remember her.
Of course, most of these women liked to begin the parties with the inevitable question, but Lara was an expert at shutting that nonsense down by now.
When she was in the wilderness, there was no one to ask her any ridiculous questions; and if Alister tried, she could just turn her headset off. She could shed all the bullshit that people tried to impose on her and she could explore, the only thing that really mattered in this life, the only thing that truly excited her.
There was nothing, absolutely nothing, in this world that held up to the feeling Lara Croft got in her chest when she was discovering something no human had touched for millennia or flying down the road on a motorbike, hair streaming in the mind. She loved the feel of rain on her skin, the grip of her pistols in her fingers, the scrapes from swinging on a rough vine, her forehead slick with sweat and her body thrumming with adrenaline. She ached for it, dreamed of it, and knew she was only happy when she was in the depths of a ruin, the air filled with secrets to be discovered.
She didn't have time for romance, not because she didn't need it, but because she didn't want it.
Lara Croft followed the plan she'd set out for herself so long ago, and she lived a good, happy (if never even the semblance of calm) life, one where she never settled for anything, but she especially never settled down.