A/N: This is just a little idea that's been nibbling at my brain all day. I just wrote it down, so apologies if it's a bit rough. Inspired by the trailer and footage from the new Tomb Raider reboot that was revealed at E3 yesterday. I've always imagined Lara as a sort of confident, quietly paranoid person. No, I don't have any secret knowledge about the game's plot details, I just don't trust this Roth guy in the slightest.
When she stopped to think about it, Lara had to admit that she rather liked hospitals. There was something about the sterile white light and the antiseptic smell that was comforting. They weren't the sort of places she'd want to stay for long but, outside of her own home, they were the only places she particularly felt safe.
Well. Almost.
There was no place on earth truly safe and she knew that. The look in Conrad Roth's eyes the last time she'd seen him had forever lodged that truth deep in her mind. After that she was never without a weapon, a plan. It had proved a very useful habit since even her own home wasn't free from danger after a certain point. Sometimes, very late at night when she couldn't control her own thoughts, she missed the innocent girl who'd boarded the Endurance all those years ago.
In their own strange way, hospitals reminded her of that girl. Many of her memories of that fated voyage were vague; flashes of pain and smells interspersed with events etched vividly into her synapses (a man's face just before a rockfall crushed him to death, the taste of sea air after the storm while she looked over a wrecked ship, a wolf's reeking breath as it yelped and coughed blood in her hair). After all of it, the thing that stood out most was nurses talking quickly in Japanese and the pain in her side shifting from the throbbing of infection to the burning of antibiotics. Someone in all of that chaos told her she was alright, she was safe. Even then she knew that wasn't true but she had just nodded. It made other people feel better in certain circumstances if they thought she trusted them.
Even now, while the doctor re-wrapped her leg, one hand warm against her knee, she was looking at the implements in the room, deciding what could be used in defense and how, looking for different escape routes. She had, naturally, left her guns at home (there was a knife tucked securely in her left boot). Unbidden a little smile came to her full lips. A large part of her found the juxtaposition of her deep paranoia in this conventionally safe place very funny. The other part still remembered how sharp a scalpel against flesh was when a hired assassin threw it at her during an overnight stay after surgery.
"And you're all set, Ms. Croft," the doctor says, patting her leg.
"Thank you," she gives him a warm smile and a polite nod.
"Everything looks good down there. Just try to take it easy on that leg and keep taking the antibiotics. You'll be fine."
"Of course."
Her smile as she walks out is broad, her stride sure.