Tomb Raider: Shadows Light
Chapter 1
As Lara Croft strode down the dark tunnel, she spotted something shimmer in the darkness, she walked over to it, only to find a small round golden disk. She stooped low to the ground and scooped up the thing in her hands. Its five blades stuck out at their usual curved angles from the gold part of the disk-like object, their own separate shade of silver; Kurtis's Chirugai. She knew what this scenario meant; the lifeless chirugai, it being on its own, and no Kurtis in sight. Kurtis never went anywhere without his chirugai, and if he ever did, it would follow along, bouncing in the air like a small puppy following its owner. If he were alive anywhere on this earth, it would find him, it would never stray from his side. But,…he wasn't anywhere in sight,…and that meant- Lara stopped herself from finishing the thought and just pulled the chirugai close to her chest. Lara hung her head and slipped her fingers into the holes where Kurtis's once sat and began to walk away from this horrible place, hoping to put all this madness behind her when- suddenly- the Chirugai started to shake violently and pulled her towards a dark tunnel behind her, almost urging her to go in it. She smiled to herself at the thought of what this might mean, and walked into the tunnel, the chirugai almost pulling her arm out of socket the entire way.
Lara had been wandering blindly through the darkness of the tunnel for about a half-hour when the lighting began to change slightly, letting her eyes adjust to the dimness of the large round room. She scanned the room, searching for the something -or someone- she was hoping that the chirugai was pulling her in the direction of. She took a few more steps forward, trying to adjust her vision to the darker parts of the room and then, suddenly, she spotted it. Or rather she spotted him. The figure of a body lay on the floor some 20 feet in front of her, in what had been a dark spot just a moment ago. Lara sprang forward, dropping the Chirugai onto the floor, producing a loud clanging noise of metal-on-metal. She crouched low, stooping down towards the body of her partner in this past adventure, trying to get a better look. She rolled Kurtis over onto his back, and his face lit up at the sight of her. "Lara…" he whispered softly, before breaking out into a coughing fit. "I- I feel,…Lara I-" He winced in pain at trying to get the words out, a look of hurt shadowing his face. "Shh, It's going to be okay Kurtis," Lara said in reply. She spotted the large gaping hole in his stomach area and slipped off her brown backpack she had had since forever, pulling out a medi-pack. Lara was careful as possible in bandaging Kurtis up, lightly wrapping the cloth like medical dressing around his body as gently as she could be, trying not to hurt Kurtis as she did so. Once she was done, she returned the rest of the medi-pack to her backpack, slid off her jean-jacket, placed it gently under Kurtis's head, making a pillow of sorts of it, and lay down next to him. "Lara, I- I want to th- thank you……for thi-this. You are….a- a tr- true…friend. I'm going to-to be…..fore-ever grateful to you." Kurtis said softly. He winced again, and Lara hushed him, saying, "Kurtis, You're going to be fine, just stay quiet. Stay with me. It's going to be alr-alright." She choked out before a single tear rolled down her cheek, letting it fall off of her chin onto Kurtis's Black T-shirt, making a single, round, wet spot on the expanse of black fabric. She lay her head down next to him, and sat there for a long, sleepless night.
As the sun rose in the morning sky, letting small bits of dawn's light filter through the holes in the ceiling and the high windows onto Kurtis and Lara's figures in the cold metal room, Lara breathed a sigh of relief to herself. Kurtis had made it through the night. The pair sat precariously, Kurtis sleeping, using Lara's jacket for a pillow and snoring softly, Lara lying there next to him, bare arms and midriff slightly cold from the bitter night, watching over Kurtis like a worried mother. She had picked up the discarded Chirugai during the night, stowing it away in her backpack for a later time. Kurtis's eyelids fluttered open at the sight of the sun's rays filtering into the room, revealing his deep blue eyes below. He yawned and rolled over to face Lara, who lay, awake still, next to him. "Good morning." he said in a voice that was soft, but not crackly and weak like that of the Kurtis she had found near-death last night. Lara smiled weakly, letting a "good morning yourself." slip through her lips in reply. Kurtis smiled and rolled back over onto his back, pulling himself up to a sitting position. He lifted his shirt slightly and studied the bandages over his wound before peeling them away. Lara started to protest at what Kurtis was doing, but Kurtis merely shushed her and pulled them away, revealing blood-soaked bandages, but nothing left of Kurtis's former hole through the stomach, just an empty, non-scarred, expanse of skin. Lara's mouth dropped open at the sight and she responded with a "How,- but how did that- what the- my god! How did you?…." Kurtis laughed lightly, and responded, "Just another amazing thing about me, Lara Croft. There are quite a few of those, wouldn't you agree?" Lara laughed quietly, then smiled at Kurtis before the truth hit her hard, "Kurtis, we have to get out of here. There could be someone lurking in here, just searching to see if there were some chance that we didn't leave, just waiting to hurt us. We have to go, have to get away. We'll have to get to the airport as fast as we can, don't know how, don't know where we'll go either, but I'm sure we can think of somethi-" Suddenly Kurtis cut her off, "Don't worry about that. I'll figure it out." Lara just nodded once, then pulled herself to her feet. Kurtis stood also, grabbing Lara's jacket and handing it to her. "You might want this back." and he half-smiled, then his expression hardened, "Which direction do we head?" he asked her, gesturing to the two tunnels on either side of them. "Well, I know that way leads out into the city, but that wouldn't be the best idea in our circumstances, and as for the other way….." she shrugged. Kurtis thought deeply for a second, then said, "Then we'll head that way," gesturing to the unknown tunnel, "besides," he shrugged also, "My bike's out that direction." Lara rolled her eyes, remarking "You men and your toys," before heading off in the selected direction.
They wandered down the dark tunnel for awhile, just going on blindly pitch-blackness of the place. Now and then bumping into each other, always staying side-by-side, until they came upon a light coming from a high window, just like those that had been in the round room where Boaz's decapitated body lay. Kurtis turned to Lara, "You want a boost?" he said, gesturing to the window, which was much to high even for Lara's jumping abilities. "I don't see what harm could come from it." and climbed onto Kurtis's hands, which lay on his outstretched knee. He lifted her up to where she could jump and grab hold of the window, and she did just that, pulling herself up whereas she could see out of the glass pane, which was streaked with rain. She looked down, and spotted Kurtis's motorcycle, which lay on its side in the pouring rain. "Your bike's out there." she called down to Kurtis, while fiddling with the lock on the window, trying to unlatch it so she could slide it open. "How the hell are we going to get to it?" Kurtis replied, "That window is barely large enough for you to slide out, much less me. And not to mention the height. There would be absolutely no way in hell I could jump up to it." Lara thought on this for a moment, still poking at the lock, "Try." she challenged him. Kurtis seemed to get the idea, then jumped up missing the window by inches. "again, now." Lara said, then watched as Kurtis jumped up, this time grabbing his right hand with her left before he could begin his descent back to the floor. She helped him up to the ledge, and he grabbed hold, pulling himself up to where she was, now continuing her fiddling with the metal lock. "Damn it." she muttered under her breath, "Why do they have to make these window locks so goddamn hard?" Then she picked at it once more, and an audible 'click' was heard. "Yes." she cheered softly, sliding the window up and open, revealing a rather small space for a person her size to slide through. As she pulled her feet up and slid them through, getting ready to follow with the rest of her body, Kurtis asked her, "Now what about me? You know goddamn well I can't slide myself through there." Lara smiled mischievously, replying, "Drop back to the ground and shield yourself. I have a plan." before disappearing the rest of the way through the open window onto the rain slicked streets of Prague. Kurtis dropped to the floor, thinking bitterly, "I have a plan." don't you always Miss Croft? For once, he wished it were him saving her ass when it was in trouble. But he did as she said, crouching low and shielding himself from whatever came next. Soon a large explosion came from the roof, bits of metal debris flying around Kurtis, one catching the skin of his left hand, leaving a deep, but rather small, gash. "Damn." he muttered after all the debris had stopped flying and inspecting his hand where the metal had cut him. Kurtis then stood up, looking to the ceiling. Lara appeared in the large gaping hole in the roof of the tunnel, sliding a grapple down to him for him to climb up. "Sticky grenades." she announced as he joined her up on the roof, where she now stood in the rain. Sliding off the roof onto the damp side-street where Kurtis's bike lay on its side. Kurtis hurried over to it, setting it upright and pulling the keys out of his pocket before swinging his leg over the seat to straddle it and starting it. He turned his torso around to face her, motioning for her to hop on behind him. "Come on," he said, "This place is giving me the creeps." Lara laughed, jumping on the back of the bike, saying as she did so, "What? Is little Kurty scared?" in a sweet, mocking tone. Kurtis took of speeding down the little side-alley of Prague just as and explosion rocked where they had just previously stood and two Cabal henchmen -clad in their gas masks and all- came running up behind them. "Damn it." Lara said in Kurtis's ear, "Your senses were right, one more second where we were and we would have bitten the dust right then and there." The Cabal weren't going very fat behind them on foot and were losing speed every second of the way, putting a lot of distance between them, but Lara wasn't about to take any chances. She searched along her sides with her right hand, still holding on to Kurtis with the left, until she found purchase on a sticky grenade, pulling the tab and launching it at their pursuers, turning into a bloody pulp spread out across the pavement. Lara returned her grip to Kurtis's body. Sleep tugged at her every nerve, she didn't know when she last HAD slept, and her body was reminding her of it with every movement she made, every joint aching when it moved even the slightest bit, her head throbbed with each beat of her heart. All Lara wanted to do was let go and give in to sleep's urges, but she fought them with all her might, because she knew that if she did, she and Kurtis would crash, more than likely injuring them both -or worse. She just fought to keep her consciousness as they sped towards the airport, When they pulled up to the gate, Lara urged her muscles to move and her nerves to wake up. They were both soaked from the ride, and Lara's dripping braid hung limply over her shoulder. She was barely aware of what was going on, all she could remember happening at the gate was Kurtis booking a flight, To where though? Screamed her mind, And them boarding the plane. She now sat in a daze on the plane, not able to go to sleep in fear of what might happen if she did. Kurtis sat next to her, also not asleep, but that was normal for someone who had slept all night and paired with the fact that it was only now hat the sun was setting. "What happened to you, back there, I mean, In the room where I found you? What happened to Boaz? And how'd you get the…" she gestured to his stomach, where the large gaping hole once was, only a night ago. Kurtis leaned back in the seat of his first-class flight chair and groaned, trying to think of all the events of the past few days. "Well, of course, you know that Ekhardt sicked that god-awful monster on me. That spawned half-carnivorous horror half-Kristina Boaz thing was a Bitch to kill. First it was in the huge spider-like form that you saw before I got you the hell outta there, and after I killed that, she -err- IT crawled out of the spider's dead body as some sort of dragonfly-Boaz thing and I killed that Bitch too, pumping her full of Boran-X until she dropped dead, or so I thought I suppose. The second I turn my back on her corpse, she skewers me through the stomach with her claw. I threw the Chirugai at her with my last bit of strength, then I blacked out for awhile until you came along. I heard footsteps, and I thought that whoever it was would either assume me dead or shoot me so I was, so boy was I surprised when you came along, and a little bit relieved at that too. And, well, I suppose you know the rest." he finished off, gesturing to the plane around them. "Yeah, I suppose I do." Lara said softly in reply.