The Camera Loves You
By Asynca, who also loves you but needs to sleep a lot more and write a lot less.
At bedtime, I had actually managed to drag one of the visitor chairs over to the door, jamming the spine of it underneath the handle. When I stood back to inspect my work, that was when I realised what I'd actually done. Who on earth barricades a hospital door based on a general feeling of unease? Clearly I was in the wrong sort of hospital if I felt like it was appropriate.
I slowly pushed the chair back beside my bed and sat on it, wondering if there was some sort of middle ground that would satisfy my anxiety but also not make it look like I was completely mad. Perhaps I could place it strategically so it would hinder someone running through the door and delay them arriving at our beds?
Sam was hunched over a hand mirror on her own bed, pretending to be completely engrossed in removing her eyeliner.
She saw me watching her in the mirror. She swallowed, but managed a smile. "Trying your hand at interior design?"
"Next project: Tokyo Asylum," I said wryly.
She put her mirror on the bedside table. "J-Pop celebrities get treated here, and their fans?" Sam made a 'cuckoo' motion next to her ear. "Totally crazy. I mean it."
"I know I'm probably being ridiculous." I pulled myself up on the edge of the bed and climbed slowly into it. "It might even be as harmless as some nice guy who likes archaeology and accidentally wandered into the wrong ward." I tucked myself in. "Can you reach the light?"
She made a noise that sounded like a 'yes', and felt around her table. The lights went out.
The drip in the back of my hand made it really hard to get comfortable. I kept catching it on the blankets when I moved them, and every now and then the machine would beep for what seemed like no reason. I stared into the dark ceiling, listening to the sound of distant traffic below. At least the window didn't open: it restricted the number of ways someone could get in. On the other hand, it occurred to me that that also meant there was only one way out of the room.
The heart monitor tracked an increase in my pulse.
"Lara?" I turned over towards Sam as she whispered, "Are you asleep?"
"No…" I said, and then exhaled at length. At this point, the sound of a pin drop would have me almost ready to run a hundred-metre dash.
"Can I…?"
I knew what she was asking. "Yes."
I heard the hiss of fabric as she slid out of bed and padded across the floor in her socks. I was on my side facing her and she climbed in front of me, slinging my arm over her hips. It meant my other arm didn't fit anywhere, so after some difficulty we found a place for it under her neck.
I always seemed to end up with my nose in her hair, I thought, breathing into it.
"I know it's kind of morbid," Sam mumbled, her cheek against my arm. "But I just have this, like, feeling that I could be killed over in that bed and you wouldn't know until you woke up in the morning."
What an awful thought. I imagined what it would be like to wake up and find Sam had been killed while I was asleep.
"At least this way we can die together, right?" I think she was trying to be funny.
"God, that is morbid." And yet, I found it strangely comforting.
"They'd probably make a movie about us," she said, running with the line of thought at a hundred miles an hour. "Kind of like Romeo and Juliet. Lucy Liu can play me. She's bi, you know." She paused. "Although kind of old now, and Chinese." When I didn't say anything, she continued, "Although I suppose the actress wouldn't have to be actually bi in real life. It's 'acting' after all."
"I've got an idea." She stopped talking to listen to it. "You can keep talking all night. That way I'll know that if you stop, you're dead."
A hand tickled my side, and I strained my stitches struggling against it. She did stay quiet, though, and I regretted joking about it. It was always fun listening to her when she was chatty.
I was actually drifting off when she spoke again. "Do you think if someone put a gun to my chest, they'd be able to shoot through you, as well?"
I pulled my arm out from under her neck. "That's it," I said. "I've had it with this constant worry."
I could dimly see her expression in the light coming from the monitor; she looked dismayed. I realised she probably thought I meant I'd had it with her worrying. I stroked her back reassuringly as I said, "I'm going to go and get those bloody flowers, let's see what the fuss is about."
She looked relieved. "Well, I'm coming, too."
I let her tie up my hospital gown so it best concealed everything. We staggered out into the corridor in our fuzzy hospital slippers like deer in headlights, with me towing the monitor and the IV behind me.
I didn't have too much bother making it to the reception – much less than I thought I would – but by the time I reached the desk I felt as if I could do with a good sit down. I leaned on the counter, breathless. "There are some flowers for me." I probably could have figured out how to say that in Japanese, but I was a little light-headed.
The duty nurse looked up from the computer. She smiled. "Yes, they are back here," she said and went 'back there' into what I presumed was the administration office to retrieve them. When she emerged, she was carrying an impossibly large, incredibly corporate bouquet. There were no roses, or lilies, or anything that could be considered at all romantic. Instead, they were some collection of exotic flowers curled around a trellis. The basket underneath contained a selection of fresh fruit. There wasn't even a 'Get Well Soon' balloon.
"Dad gets stuff like this from investors," Sam remarked, inspecting one of the flowers. "You think they're poisonous?"
The nurse looked a little alarmed, but said nothing.
I picked out a sky blue envelope from where it was tucked in the fruit. There was a sticker on the back. "Interflora," I read. "He was probably just a delivery man." For a moment I felt enormously relieved.
"Isn't it strange he wasn't Japanese?"
So much for being comforting, I thought. I opened the envelope. There was some sort of corporate logo embossed on the paper the message was printed on, but I didn't recognise it. I read the message aloud to Sam.
"Miss Croft,
We would like to arrange a meeting with you to discuss an exciting but confidential project we are currently working on. Please contact us at your earliest convenience. The details are below."
Sam made a face. "That sounds like a sales pitch. Who sent it?"
I looked at the contact details. "It actually doesn't say."
I let her take the letter from me and examine it herself. "Well, at least it doesn't say, 'I'm coming to kill you, ha ha ha haaa'." She made me laugh again, which once again hurt my stomach. "Are you going to call them?" She lifted the basket up and took a step back toward our room.
I pressed my lips together, pushing away from where I had been leaning on the counter top. To tell the truth, I was actually rather curious. "I'm not sure. Perhaps."
Back in the room, she set the basket on the chair beside my bed and helped me back into it. Shrugging off her dressing gown, she kneeled on the bed and crawled over my legs, inching up next to me and slipping under the blanket.
She had no reason to still be scared, I thought as she looped my arm over her head and settled in the crook of my arm. I didn't really mind at all – she had always been very touchy-feely and it was one of the things I liked about her— but she'd never slept in bed with me without a reason. This time it was doubly awkward because her cheek was against one of my breasts and I couldn't possibly believe she hadn't noticed.
I must have been stiff, because half-sat up. "This is okay, isn't it?" The green light from the heart monitor lit her face again. She'd phrased the question very casually, but she was waiting with bated breath for my answer. I saw her throat bob as she swallowed.
Smiling faintly, I hugged her head back down with the arm that was around her. "It's fine," I said. "The bed's just rather small, that's all."
I felt her arm drape across my waist as she relaxed into me. "Home tomorrow," she murmured.
Home, I thought. Sam hadn't lived for any length of time in Japan since she was eighteen, but I assumed by 'home' she meant her father's estate.
The street the property was on was jokingly referred to as 'The Gauntlet' because of all the double and triple-parked cars full of a mixture of private security, crazed fans and the occasional paparazzi. I wasn't particularly looking forward to 'running' it, but I was certain Sam and her family wouldn't let me sneak out of hospital without any sort of fanfare.
I decided I could weather the attention because Mr. Nishimura had all of the artefacts I'd recovered stored in one of the safes on his property, and I had to be responsible and do something with them.
Focusing on the memory of how triumphant I'd felt when I'd reached them, I tried to work up some sort of excitement about the fact that I, Lara Croft, had been the one to discover them. I just felt exhausted at the thought of dealing with them again.
My father would have been so disappointed if he knew how much I just wanted to leave them in the safe. Roth wouldn't have let me get away with it, either. He'd always known exactly the right thing to say to set me straight. The prospect of organizing my own expeditions and running them all myself was horribly daunting; Roth's wisdom was always the one thing that held everything together, including me.
I hugged Sam closer to me and tried in vain to get some sleep.
