Title: When You Have No More Strength to Run (From the Fear of Falling Apart)
Author: vendettadays
Fandom: Tomb Raider (2013)
Characters: Lara Croft, Sam Nishimura
Rating: M
Length: 2208
Summary: It took a year of travelling the world for the solitude to catch up with Lara and she was tired of running away. With 33,000 feet of air between her and the ground, she was finally able to admit that she missed Sam.
A/N: Song of choice here was the piano version of 'This is Gospel' by Panic at the Disco, which was on repeat while I wrote this. I can't decide if this is a sequel to 'When All You Know is How to Run', but it's not necessary to read it and this will make sense by itself regardless - hope you all enjoy reading it!
It took a year of travelling the world for the solitude to catch up with Lara. She was halfway into a month-long trek of the Eastern Gobi desert steppe when weariness settled into her bones, like the desert chill at night and she realised that was tired of running.
She had hiked across deserts, climbed mountains, and trekked through forests, all to silence the voices in her head. That had happened six months ago when she had managed barely to outrun a pack of wolves in Tibet. She had scaled the side of a cliff with bloodied fingertips, scrambling feet, and adrenaline in her veins before she noticed that the only sound she could hear was the rasping gasps of her breath and her racing pulse in her ears. The silence had been jarring after months of hearing Roth's last breaths in her ear and Sam's scream as she'd plunged a lit torch into the Sun Queen's chest, but she had looked at the pine trees and frigid mountain caps with new eyes afterwards.
But now, without those voices, there was only sand in her boots, a ratty rucksack on her back, and a climbing axe in her belt and she was so, so tired of it all.
'Is everything alright?' asked her guide. He waited for Lara several metres in front of where she had stopped.
'Yes, I'm fine,' she replied around the lump that had risen quite suddenly in her throat. 'I think I found what I've been searching for.'
He nodded, like he knew exactly what it was that she had found, and turned around to start the journey back. He drove her to the airport and she thanked him for everything, but he shrugged and waved her away.
She was tired of running, but she wasn't ready to go home yet. So she bought a cheap ticket and hoped that Japan was more welcoming this time round. With 33,000 feet of air between her and the ground, she was finally able to admit why she had chosen the cheaper ticket to Japan rather than the cheapest ticket to somewhere else. It had taken a year and a lot of postcards sighed with only her name for her to realise that she missed Sam.
The town of Ishikawa was quaint and quiet, stuck ten years in the past and Lara liked it that way. The locals left her alone and kept their questions to themselves ever since she had arrived nine weeks ago. Her Japanese was rusty and her pronunciation was off, but twisting her tongue into comforting syllables was the closest she got to home at the moment. And for now that was enough.
Lara stilled outside her door with her key an inch away from the lock. It was imperceptible to everyone else but her, the tiniest gap between the door and the frame, but it was as glaring to her as deer tracks in snow. Someone was inside her flat and they had deliberately left it unlocked. She slowly pocketed her keys and her hand hovered by her belt for an invisible climbing axe as she opened the door.
Standing in the middle of her tiny flat was the one man she had least expected to see wearing her spare slippers. A year might have passed, but Mr Nishimura looked the same as he did when he had visited her in hospital. Dressed in a dark grey suit, black hair streaked with grey combed tidily to the side, and an impeccably straight posture.
'Ms Croft.' He nodded at her, face serious and unyielding.
Lara took her shoes off and walked inside. She bowed deeply in greeting. 'Mr Nishimura.'
He huffed and sat himself in the only chair in her flat. 'I see you have learned some manners.'
'How did you find me?' asked Lara. She dropped her tote bag of teaching materials onto the floor and busied herself with making tea in the kitchenette in her hallway.
'You make it very hard for people to track you, but not hard enough.' Mr Nishimura reached inside his suit and pulled a folded sheaf of papers that he held out for her. 'A foreign woman teaching English in a small town in Shimane Prefecture is the quickest way to draw attention to yourself.'
Lara stopped filling the kettle and took the papers without reading them. 'What is it?'
'A contract,' said Mr Nishimura. 'An expedition, fully funded to Siberia.'
'Why?'
'Everyone thinks you are crazy, Ms Croft. You are ridiculed by those in academia for believing in nonsense like your late father. Painted as a mad woman in the media for the things that you experienced when you were delirious from infection. You then scour the Earth for answers, but you have found nothing to support your ravings.' Mr Nishimura raised an eyebrow at Lara's shaking fists, the papers crinkling. 'Everything about Yamatai was a figment of your imagination. Shall I go on?'
Lara ground her teeth and glared at Mr Nishimura. Manners and etiquette be damned. She breathed deeply through her nose and exhaled from her mouth, forcibly relaxing her hands that had gone white from how hard she had held them. 'Everything happened –'
'And I lost a great deal of money.'
'Tell that to the people who covered it up.' Lara scoffed and crossed her arms. Of course, it was always going to be about money.
'No, I will not be the one to tell them. You will.'
That was all she needed to hear and she made her decision in an instant. She flipped to the last page of the scrunched up document and sighed her name on the dotted line, the tip of her pen ripping through the paper, and dated it. She could have signed her life away to the Nishimura family for all she cared, but she didn't, not if it meant that the world could know about the three days that had changed her life.
Mr Nishimura stood up and straightened his clothes and picked up the sighed contract on his way to the door. He passed Lara in the hallway and Lara couldn't stop herself from asking the one question that was constantly on her mind.
'How is Sam?'
For the first time during their meeting, Lara saw an expression other than neutral indifference on Mr Nishimura's face. He stopped in front of her, mouth thinned to a straight line, and his jaw worked like he was grinding his molars together. 'I believe, Ms Croft that you have lost the privilege of talking to me about my daughter.'
Lara ducked her head and focused on the tatami mats underneath her feet. The back of her neck prickled with shame as she remembered the last time she had seen Sam: wrapped in a thin blanket that they had shared hours before and face filled with hurt and an acceptance that she did not deserve.
'You will honour your agreement, Ms Croft.' The door opened and closed with a click.
Lara hesitated outside the white, wooden door, hands clenching and unclenching as she tried to bring herself to knock. She should have gone back to her flat on Gower Street, and like how she could not stop herself from asking Mr Nishimura about Sam, she could not have stopped herself from seeing Sam the moment she landed in Heathrow.
It was eleven-fifty at night, but the sliver of light between the floor and the bottom of the door kept Lara rooted to the spot. She had no phone. No key to the building. The only way she had got inside was when someone had left just as she had arrived outside. With a shaking breath, she knocked three times.
She counted the footsteps on the other side of the door that got louder with each second that passed and willed herself to stay when her legs wanted to run. The door opened and Lara's heart stuttered like a stalling engine. There was no surprised gasp or tears or hug as she had expected, and Lara wasn't exactly sure what she had expected.
Sam stared at her, mouth opened slightly. Lara moved closer to Sam who jerked back, eyes steeled with a glint hardened by anger that had grown and festered in the year of Lara's absence. She followed Sam inside and sat down on the sofa next to her.
'Why are you here?'
For you, thought Lara. She wrung her hands together until the joints in her fingers clicked and popped. 'I sighed a contract. I still haven't read it, but I don't think I breached it by seeing you.'
'What contract?' Sam's forehead furrowed into a frown.
'Your dad found me and offered a fully funded expedition to Siberia,' said Lara quietly.
'So you're leaving,' said Sam flatly, and Lara's heart sunk at how much she sounded like her father. 'You came to tell me that you're leaving again.'
Lara reached out and held onto Sam's hands. The callused pads of her fingers traced the splashes of light blue on Sam's wrists and forearms, a permanent and physical reminder of the things that everyone said did not happen.
'Not immediately.' Lara paused, an apology on the tip of tongue for leaving, for running, for not being here, but she swallowed it down and wetted her lips. 'They deserve to be remembered.'
Roth, Grim, Alex, and even Whitman deserved to be remembered. She stopped short of thinking that she deserved to be remembered, but she owed it to them and to each of the surviving members of the Endurance to uncover the truth, even if it meant leaving Sam again.
Lara looked at Sam, the anger returned like a spark of lightning in her eyes like she had read Lara's thoughts. Sam pulled Lara into a bruising kiss, teeth nipping against her lips hard enough to hurt and leave them swollen in the morning, but Lara did not stop her. There might have been quiet acceptance when she had left, but Sam's forgiveness needed to be earned.
Sam tugged Lara's t-shirt over her head, the air chilling her skin, and Lara gasped as Sam's nails dug into her back. She imagined the red lines against her skin and her chest heaved as Sam bit and sucked too hard at the delicate skin on her neck. She swallowed loudly when Sam pushed her down onto the sofa, unable to take her eyes away when Sam unbuttoned her jeans, dragging it down until the material bunched around Lara's thighs.
'Sam,' said Lara, voice trembling with need. Sam nodded, terse and stiff, and slipped her hand into Lara's underwear.
The quietness of the flat filled with their short, sharp breaths and there was no pretence in what they were doing. There was no playful teasing, no gentle caress that Lara had ached for on those lonely nights inside her sleeping bag with her hand between her legs and bottom lip between her teeth. She wanted lazy Sunday mornings with coffee and tea just as much as she wanted Sam's fucks, fuelled by hurt for being left behind and rage at her for leaving.
Lara came with a strangled cry, eyes closed tightly and back arched in the air. The sofa shifted and she felt Sam's lips against her wet cheeks and her fingers, hot and sticky, at her waist.
'Lara, look at me, please.'
She opened her eyes and the anger was gone, replaced by a soft expression of concern that was all Sam.
'Hey.'
'Hey,' whispered Lara, as she wrapped her arms around Sam's neck and buried her face into her shoulder.
Lara blinked and stared up at the dark ceiling, suddenly awake and alert as the last of the dream drifted from her mind. She could not remember what it was about and she did not want to. The nightmares were far and few between, but they had not gone away completely.
Away from civilisation, exhaustion had driven the nightmares away and sleep had been easier. In the small town of Ishikawa the nights had been manageable, but there was something about London that threatened to rip away all the progress she had made in a year. It was the yellow glare of the city lights at night, the hum of traffic outside the flat, and the press of four walls around her that pulled the shadows into the corners. It was Sam lying next to her, naked and vulnerable, and the unsaid things that they both lacked the courage to say out loud.
'Don't you dare think about leaving,' mumbled Sam.
Lara shivered as Sam's warm breath ghosted the back of her neck. She twisted around on the cramped sofa and faced Sam, edging as close as she could, so that the press of Sam's body was all she felt.
'I'm not going anywhere,' she said into Sam's hair.
The silent not yet hung heavy between them, but it was the closest she could get to saying that she was staying for now without lying. Sam's arms tightened, almost painfully, around her waist. Lara closed her eyes and pushed the thought that Sam was the cause of her fears and nightmares from her mind.