DAY 5
Lara was in bed, nose buried in some ancient tome that was probably spraying all sorts of mold and spores into her lungs. Off to the side was her ipad, with some kind of strange writing on the screen, and a sketchbook with the same alphabet and some crossed-out attempts at deciphering it.
Ugh. Four days after her visit with Dr. Kimura and she was already looking ahead to her next unsolved mystery. She was wearing the same clothes as she had been last night, which meant that she'd been up all night doing this. I quietly tried to figure out what it was she was reading, so I could get an idea of what she was up to, but it was pointless. I could only hope she would share it with me when she was ready.
Lara chewed at her pencil, deep in thought, and I couldn't help but be endeared. She was being so adorably and determinedly geeky that I just had to disturb her little bubble of calm.
"I notice you're wearing the same clothes from last night," I said abruptly, waltzing into her room.
She grinned at me. "Well-spotted. Nothing gets past you."
"So...who's the guy?" I teased. "Must be something if he had you out all night long."
"You know there's no guy."
"Handsome, I bet. Centuries old and weathered, rusty around the corners, but the Japanese inscription still readable on the back?"
That got a laugh. Lara snapped her book and sketchpad shut and sat up to make room for me on the bed. I casually reached out for the ipad, but she quickly closed the browser and the weird alphabet disappeared.
"All right. What is it you want, Sam?"
I flopped down next to her and sprawled myself out. Lara rolled her eyes and stroked my hair idly, as she tried to find space on the nightstand to set her stuff. It was too piled high with archaeology junk, so she just tossed it on the rug.
"You know, living with you is what I imagine having a cat to be like," she said, as I got my head comfortable in her lap. "Inconveniently getting in the way of my reading, taking up all the space in the bed, and almost always reliably pooping in a designated area."
I snorted. "So, what were you researching all night that's so secret you won't even let me take a look?"
Lara's hand stopped in my hair. I wasn't always so blunt with her, but it worried me when she kept secrets. Especially now, not even a month out of Yamatai, when we needed our best friends the most.
"Cuneiform," she admitted finally. "Before we left on the Endurance I'd been archiving my parent's work, particularly my father's. I uploaded everything I could in digital form and now that I finally have the time to look through it…"
"What's cuneiform?" I asked, genuinely curious.
"It's the most ancient form of script dating back as far as four millenia BCE, in ancient Sumer," Lara explained, suddenly animated as she turned her ipad back on. She was always pleased to lecture about ancient gobbledegook and even though I had only a mild interest in some of it, I was always happy to oblige. Especially if it meant she was opening up to me. She showed me a picture of a really old, flat piece of stone with the strange alphabet on it. "It's almost like pictographs, you can see, it has a very distinctive bar or wedge-shaped form of lettering."
"Okay…"
"The reason it's like that is because cuneiform originated in a time when everything was carved and etched into clay tablets or stone."
She grabbed her really old book and opened it. I could practically see the bacterial organisms coming off it.
"Strange, isn't it?"
"Yeah, but I guess this is just what it feels like to breathe in a rotavirus?"
"I mean the writing."
"The whole thing is in cuneiform," I realized, pulling my shirt over my nose.
"That's right. And this journal is from 1902, my father found it in his travels. Why, nearly 2 thousand years after cuneiform was phased out of existence, is someone writing it in a journal?"
"Maybe he's a bigger dork than you."
Lara grinned, but continued. "Not only that, ancient Sumerian has been largely deciphered since the mid-1800's to early 1900's. I should be able to find at least a minimal translation for this, but it's pure nonsense. The characters used are clear, but the words they form don't make any sense."
I let the dramatic pause run as long as I could before patting her cheek mockingly.
"See? Was that so hard to just tell me?"
She rolled her eyes. "I wasn't hiding it from you."
I gave her a look.
"Fine, I was, but only because I knew it would bother you, that I was already diving back into new research." She was stroking my hair again. "I figured you might think I was that much closer to diving back into the field, and you'd worry."
"What I worry about is you hiding things from me," I said seriously. "If you don't share stuff with me...I mean, your father had some people his side. You need someone on your side."
"Even if it involves old historical junk?"
"Especially old historical junk," I said. "Because I get to film it and turn it into a documentary."
Lara smirked. "Of course. Unfortunately, I'm not sure how much exceptional camera footage would help me with this. I was going to give Alister a call this afternoon."
Alister Fletcher was one of our friends back in London. We all went to UCL together, although he was a bit older, a 28 year old genius working on a PhD in ancient history after already earning Bachelor's and Master's degrees in archaeology and anthropology. The man wouldn't rest until he completed his History Trifecta of Nerdhood. He was basically Lara in six years, except I could never picture him embarking on international expeditions, and I could no longer picture Lara being something as innocuous as an academic.
He was also the one guy Lara ever slept with, although that confession took a wild amount of vodka to squeeze out of her. It was obvious what drew her to him, even if 'skinny beanpole blonde with thick plastic glasses' wasn't exactly someone I thought was Lara's type. Even though that relationship didn't last, for whatever reason, they remained very good friends. I had teased Lara relentlessly about it when he ended up being her TA in her final term, turning the entire thing into this hilariously cute and sordid affair between student and teacher.
They hadn't been a couple for a year, but bringing him up was the perfect segue into what I had originally wanted to say when I first came into her room.
"Speaking of your scandalous affair - "
"No one was speaking about that!"
" - with your professor turned loverrrr - " I continued.
"We ended that relationship before he ended up being my TA!"
" - back in jolly old London, I was wondering what your feelings about that were."
She was bright red and it was delightful. "We haven't been together for nearly a year! We're just friends!"
"Not your feelings about Alister," I snickered. "Although, wow, defensive much?"
"Get out."
"I'm talking about your thoughts on London. This morning I spoke to Dr. Kimura."
Her eyebrows shot up. "What? Why? About me?"
"Obviously about you. He's not my doctor."
"Why are you talking to my doctors about me?" Lara demanded. "Also, why are they giving you all this information? Does patient confidentiality not exist in Japan?"
"I just tell them I'm your wife."
She groaned and gave me a shove off her lap. "You really have to stop doing that!"
"I just needed to know if you were okay to fly in an airplane," I explained, reaching into my purse and pulling out a squashed envelope.
"What is that?" Lara was shying away from the envelope like it was full of snakes. I slapped her on the arm repeatedly with it until she grabbed it from me. She opened it and her eyes widened.
"Tickets to London?!"
"We're going home!" I crowed. Frankly, I expected more of an overjoyed reaction, but Lara just looked confused. She was scrutinizing the words on the tickets, like they had some kind of hidden meaning in them other than 'Terminal C, Gate 4'.
"I thought I had to stay put for six weeks? Doctors orders, remember?"
"I asked Dr. Kimura, and he said you can go as long I give you this," I pulled a plastic package from my purse and held it up. It contained a small syringe needle containing forty milligrams of some kind of blood thinner that I had Dr. Kimura fax over to the pharmacy. "And I had him send over a referral to a doctor in London who can do your follow-up care."
"What is that?" She eyed the syringe like I was pointing a gun at her.
"It's so you don't get a blood clot that travels to your lungs and kills you on the plane."
"Well, that sounds...lovely."
"It's easy. I YouTubed how to give injections, it'll be fine!" I insisted. I opened the plastic package and Lara scrambled away from me, alarmed.
"Whoa, whoa, wait, you YouTubed how to give shots?!"
I shrugged. "Well, how else am I supposed to learn these kind of things?"
"I don't know, nursing school!? Medical school?!"
"Oh, relax, Croft," I rolled my eyes. "YouTube is great. That's how I learned how to save battery life on my phone and do proper contour makeup."
She looked stricken. "Let me see it, I want to make sure you don't accidentally make me hemorrhage from every orifice."
"Gross, Lara." I let her take the package and read it carefully. "Come on, I know you want to go home."
We'd been in Tokyo for nearly four weeks now, although most of that time had been spent in the hospital. After Jonah and Reyes left for home, I knew she was getting a little stir-crazy. Especially after the house arrest I imposed on her when I found out she was sneaking into the shipyards. It wasn't like Japan was new to her, she'd been here to visit with me, gone on excavations with Roth and her parents, and done the tourist thing a ton of times over the years. Now that she'd discovered Yamatai, there were virtually no stones left unturned in this place. No more new adventures. She was getting bored, already onto the next thing with her weird cuneiform book.
"We don't have to go back to London yet for my sake," she said finally. "I'm fine here, Sam, if you want to stay a while longer."
That was a lie. I'd be the first to admit my father's mansion was an incredible architectural feat of modern style and classic Japanese influence. Being the heir to a multimedia fortune had that advantage. The downside was that my father was always away on business. He'd been around for that first week after being rescued, to make sure I was okay and that I was being looked after. He wanted to check on Lara too, since he always liked her. But when it became clear that we'd be fine, he dumped a ton of money in our laps and flew off to the States for a meeting in Hollywood to promote the Yamatai documentary.
The international media storm resulting from our Yamatai discovery was giving his company a field day. What little video footage I captured was apparently just as valuable as any of the gold relics we brought with us. Nishimura Entertainment was developing my footage as quickly as it could while Yamatai interest was still high, and my father and uncle were scrambling for copyrights and all sorts of other legal things to keep coverage under their umbrella. They left with barely a pat on the back and a "job well done".
It wasn't exactly new. It was the story of my life. But being alone in a huge mansion just made everything that much more uncomfortable. I was getting just as restless as Lara. We needed our normalcy back.
"I don't need to stay here," I told her.
"But when your father and uncle come back - "
I scoffed. "When they eventually come back, they'll be too busy to notice whether or not we're even here."
Lara pursed her lips. She never dared say it, but I knew what she really thought of my family. It had been different for her - she'd lost her family, but every single one of them loved her without a doubt. I had a father and uncle who did care about me to some degree, but were too busy with work to acknowledge it, and a mother that barely remembered that I existed.
"I think we'll both be better if we just went back to London," I insisted. "I even got a freelance job with the BBC. Mostly editing and reshooting local news shots, but it's something."
"That sounds nice."
It did not, but it was a start. Until the Yamatai documentary was released, my professional history wasn't all that impressive. I shrugged.
"Honestly, it doesn't matter what I'm doing. Living in London with you was more a home than I ever had here, or anywhere else my family shuffled me around."
The look on Lara's face was unreadable. Anyone else would have assumed she was staring at me blankly, but I'd known her too long to think that. There was always something going on in that head of hers.
"What?" I waved my hand in front of her face. "Hello?"
She shook her head. "Sorry, I just...me too."
"You too?"
"I mean, living in our flat in London is the only home I really had since my parents died," she said softly. She still had that odd look in her eyes and whatever it was, I guess it made her self-conscious. She looked away.
I raised an eyebrow, but didn't ask. "Right. Anyway, I know you've been getting bored here. Tokyo isn't some cool exotic place to you, and there's nothing for you to climb or excavate or battle to the death - "
She smiled.
" - so let's just go home. Real home. London. We'll heal better there, don't you think?"
"Yes. I think we'd be happier."
"And we'll see our friends again," I added. Our four years at University College London were the longest the two of us had ever stayed in one place. It was the first time in our lives that we managed to make friends, with each other and with a small group of other students. Alister and the others - Zip, Naya, and Amanda - were all wonderful, and they had all decided to stay in London after graduation. They had been texting us frantically since news broke about Yamatai.
"Our friends..." Lara echoed, but I saw the darkening of her eyes. No doubt she was thinking about the friends we'd lost on the Endurance.
"We could be gone by nightfall!" I said brightly, trying to snap her out of it. Our flight was for eight that evening, which I'll admit was mildly impulsive, but Lara should be used to that kind of thing from me. She shook her head at me, amused.
"We have like, a week left on the lease for our flat and never renewed it," she laughed. "Where exactly are we going to live?"
"Oh, right. No, it's fine. I bought a townhouse."
She froze. "You what?!"
"A townhouse," I explained. "At least, that's what they're called in the States. I don't remember what they called it in London. A terraced house, I think? You know, a row of houses all stuck together with a cute little stoop out front - "
"I know what a - you bought a house? How do you just buy a house!?"
"Um, I'm rich?" This was far from the weirdest thing I'd ever done. I didn't understand why she was staring at me with such disbelief. "I closed on it before we left on the Endurance. I mean, I plan on living in London for a while, and I know you prefer a small place in London to your parents' old mansion in the country. So why not? There's three bedrooms, for you, me and the other will be for when Jonah visits or if Reyes ever decided to take her daughter on an English vacation or something. Maybe we'll come across Amanda shitfaced in the streets and she'll need a place to sleep."
Lara's mouth had dropped open, and she wasn't making any noise.
"It's a cute house," I continued, unsure of why I was carrying on this conversation alone. "It's super-old, from like the 1700s, so you'll be happy with all the dusty crap lying around. I even know which bedroom you'll pick when you see it - it has an actual reading nook. I didn't even know that was a thing until the agent told me. As soon as I saw it, I could picture you all curled up in there with all your gross fungus-y books and ancient scrolls or whatever."
I could tell she was trying to form words now, so I waited.
"So...so hang on, let me get this straight," Lara said slowly. "The timestamps on these tickets say you bought them at 7:32 AM. I know you had to have called Dr. Kimura today, because he wasn't in his office all weekend, and his office doesn't open until 9. So you bought these tickets first, for a flight this evening, without even checking with me or my doctor. Then you went the the pharmacy to pick up a blood thinner and researched online how to stab me with it so you could fly me halfway around the world to a house you bought for us to live in? All before 10AM?!"
"A house for me to live in," I corrected playfully, booping her on the nose with a finger. "You're just coming along because otherwise you'd be homeless."
"Oh, of course!" she said hastily, a dark blush spreading across her cheeks. "Of course, it's your house. I'll be paying you rent, obviously."
"Obviously. I'm not a sugar mama."
"Right."
I giggled at how flustered she seemed. If I didn't know better, I'd think she was a little high on her pain meds, she was being so strange. I reached out and hugged her to me.
"What's the matter with you, lately?" I released her and moved her bangs from her face. They were getting pretty long, starting to get in the way of those big brown eyes of hers. When we got to London, I'd need to trim them for her.
"Nothing. Nothing, I'm just…" Lara exhaled a deep breath that I hadn't even realized she'd been holding. "Thank you, Sam."
"Don't mention it." I brandished her syringe. "Now pull up your shirt. The internet said this has to go in the subcutaneous fat of your belly, which is going to be harder to find than Yamatai was."
Lara was being adorable again. "You have an alcohol pad to wipe the skin off first, right?"
"Would you relax? I told you, I YouTubed this!"
"That's not nearly as comforting as you think it is, Sam." But she pulled up her shirt anyway.
Just as I suspected, there was little fatty real estate to speak of. The extensive scar on her belly took up a good amount of room, too. Common sense, plus the terrified look on Lara's face, told me that I probably shouldn't stick it anywhere near there. The rest of her was mostly smooth, lean muscle covered with soft, creamy skin. It was in stark contrast to the skin of her arms and legs, which had gotten tan and firmer from exposure. I didn't realise I was staring until she cleared her throat loudly.
"Sam?"
I shook out of that weird funk. "Sorry. Sorry. I, uh, okay. I'm going to do it right...there."
Lara adjusted herself and the sight of her bare torso wriggling on her sheets made me pause again.
What the actual hell.
"You know, I could probably do it myself, if you're nervous," she said, holding her hand out for the syringe. "You've done enough already for me, after all. Just tell me how."
"Shut up," I said quickly. "You carried my ass down a mountain. Least I could do is stick you with a needle. Just...stop moving, would you?"
She did and I opened up an alcohol wipe. The internet said that for people with little body fat, it would be all right to pinch up an inch of skin and inject the blood thinner in there. I just had to be careful not to get it into a muscle, or else it would absorb too quickly. And there certainly was more muscle on Lara than anything. Really nice muscle.
"Sam…"
"I've got it," I snapped and just wiped off a random spot about three inches away from the bottom of her scar. Then I pinched up the soft, white skin there and pierced her with the needle before I lost my nerve. When she didn't scream in agony, I pushed the plunger down until the syringe was empty. So far so good.
I pulled the needle out and Lara suddenly screeched.
"Ahhhhh!"
"Oh my God!" I screamed "Oh, my God, oh, my god, ohmyGod! I'm sorry sorry I'm sorrysorryyy!"
I had thrown the needle to the floor and was already starting to dial an ambulance when I realized Lara was in hysterics, laughing at me.
"L-Lara?!"
"Oh, my goodness." She was laughing so hard I saw tears. Actual, real tears of mirth. "I'm sorry, Sam. You just looked so concerned, I had to take the mickey out of you."
"You're...okay?" My heart was still pounding out of my chest.
"Of course. You did fine. I was just kidding," she sniffed and coughed out one last chuckle. "Sorry."
It had been so long since I'd seen Lara laugh like that. Months, probably. She was never a practical joker, but when the rare opportunity presented itself, she couldn't pass it up. I was never prepared, and no one ever really believed me. Fourth year, when I had that obsession with sriracha and she secretly put it in my morning tea, none of our friends believed that brooding, serious Lara Croft would ever do such a thing - it was more realistic that I would set my own mouth on fire. I was the only one she was ever comfortable joking with, it was my cross to bear.
But if it meant I got to see her like this, I bore it proudly.
"I hate you."
"I know you do," she smirked. "Sam, thank you."
"You said that already," I said, hopping off the bed to pick the needle up off the floor. YouTube had said if you depressed the plunger hard enough a plastic protector would pop up and shield the needle from any accidental sticks. It did.
When I turned back, Lara was standing right behind me, so close that we almost knocked foreheads.
"Lara…?" Suddenly her arms wrapped around me in a strong embrace. I almost didn't want her to let go, except for the fact that she was wearing really old clothes from yesterday and she hadn't showered yet. "You smell gross."
She laughed.
Author's Note: The friends Sam mentioned - Alister, Naya, Amanda, and Zip, are all characters in Tomb Raider Legend/Underworld. They're only gonna be vaguely similar to the characters they are in the games. Also, "Naya" is actually Anaya Imanu, I just couldn't stand that all of Lara Croft's friends start with the letter "A" so Anaya gets to have a nickname :-P
